Edward Cella: Dancing About Architecture
Edward Cella Art + Architecture is more than an art gallery—it’s an exhibition program with a mission. Over the past ten-plus years, first in Santa Barbara and on LA’s Miracle Mile since 2009, the gallery’s expansive activities have explored the ages-old dialogue between fine art and architecture with a sophisticated and nuanced series of exhibitions, artist grants, and public forums. Reflecting the modern taste for interdisciplinary boundary-blurring, specifically the extensive overlapping connections and resonances between painting, drawing and modern architecture, ECAA is not an advocate of any particular aesthetic style. Rather, its focus is on illuminating the character of the creative process—through the lens of Cella’s personal curatorial, scholarly vision.
Abstraction’s natural inhabitation of spatial, structural elements of form, its natural facility for depicting the spaces inside and between objects, makes it a natural idiomatic counterpart to the psychologically compelling quality of architectural renderings; and the history of mutual influence, as well as tension between the practices of artists and builders, is certainly a story worth telling. In terms of what gallery-goers are likely to encounter, ECAA remains essentially a painting and drawing gallery—though there is a hefty presence of “alternative-process” photographers in the program; and despite its predilection for minimalism and abstraction, the work of more than a few fine figurative painters adds considerably to its depth.
A recent exhibition of meditative, elegant, and quirky abstract geometrical watercolors by the renowned architect Frederick Fisher is a perfect exemplar of the ECAA mission. A delightful exhibition in its own right, the extensive series of intimate color sketches revealed a great deal about the way Fisher plays with space and mass, theorizing by hand, if you will, as he seeks a clearing, a balance, a certain harmony—almost like working on a puzzle. Carl Jung once wrote, “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain,” and it’s exactly that kind of process made visible that is the goal and privilege of ECAA. The current exhibition of large-scale abstract paintings, Depth of Field by Mark Harrington (who lives and works in Bavaria, also underscoring ECAA’s international scope) presents a very different exhibition experience; however, the artist’s articulated interest in the optical and quasi-spatial experience of the receding picture plane makes both a compelling topic for abstract painting, and an ideal overlap with an architect’s creation and encapsulation of empty interior spaces waiting to be fulfilled by encounters with sentient, mobile individuals.
Other artists and architects represented in the gallery’s holdings, whose work spans the last century, help expound on the asymmetrical balance at ECAA. From Ed Ruscha’s own well-documented enchantment with LA buildings (notably, Standard Oil and Sunset Strip edifices), not to mention his famous, ongoing collaborations with Frank Gehry—also represented in the ECAA stable; to Lucas Reiner’s urban landscapes depicting the contortions and DIY vernaculars that pop up in response to the blunt instruments of committee-ordered, aesthetically analgesic, neglectful civic maintenance. From Lee Friedlander’s photo-based images poetically interpreting the experience of inside places and personal, creative spaces; to Wayne Thiebaud’s flirtations with abstraction, expressing the effects of distance, perspective, and motion in the experience of a city—ECAA examines the architecture/art discourse from every angle. Deconstructivist icon Peter Eisenman; the progressive, interdisciplinary practices of Carlos Diniz, Ball-Nogues and Lead Pencil Studio; the rarely seen personal works of titans like Le Corbusier, Neutra, Schindler whose efforts have inspired not only future architects, but also painters, photographers, scholars, and aficionados for generations—all of these elements and many more of equal stature give ECAA a flavor not unlike what a campus gallery at the Bauhaus might have had—expressing the free dialogue between equal branches of artistic endeavor, deliberated housed under one roof.
Philip Johnson has said that, “All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space,” and Constantin Brancusi called architecture “inhabited sculpture.” But when it comes to ECAA, it’s fittingly the words of Frank Stella that best express the open-ended experiment underway on its walls: “Architecture can’t fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn’t real.”
If you enjoyed the article, why not subscribe?
1 Trackback(s)