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Born:
Glendale, California
1948
Master of Fine Arts
Califronia State University, Northridge
1973
SOLO
EXHIBITIONS
1975
Nicholas Wilder Gallery
Los Angeles
1976
Claire Copley Gallery
Los Angeles
1978
Mount St. Mary's College Fine Arts Gallery
Los angeles
1980
Roy Boyd Gallery
Chicago
1981
Simard/Weber Gallery
Los Angeles
1981
Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery
Los Angeles
1982
Roy Boyd Gallery
Los Angeles and Chicago
SELECTED
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1975
Nicholas Wilder Gallery
Los Angeles
1975
"Current Concerns, Part 2"
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art
1975
Broxton Gallery
Los Angeles
1975
"Pasadena in Los Angeles"
California State University
Los Angeles
1977
"100 Plus"
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art
1977
Art Rental Gallery
Newport Harbor Art Museum
Newport Beach, CA
1977
"We All Were Here"
California State University
Northridge, CA
1978
"Patterns, Structures, Grids"
California State University
San Bernardino, CA
1978
"100 Plus: Current Directions in Southern California Art"
Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art
1978
"Exhibition '76/'77"
Advisory Council for the Arts
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Los Angeles
1979
Recent Los Angeles Painting"
Lang Art Gallery
Scripps College
Claremont, CA
1979
"Abspects of Abstract: Recent West Coast Abstract Painting and
Sculpture"
Crocker Art Museum
Sacramento, CA
1979
"Selections from the Frederick Weisman Company Collection of
Southern California Art"
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Washington D.C.
1980
"Selections from the Frederick Weisman Company Collection of
Southern California Art"
Albequerque Museum
Albequerque, NM
1981
"Los Angeles Painting: The Decade"
Art Center College of Design
Pasadena, CA
1981
"Painters"
California State University
Diminquez Hills
Carson, CA
"Decorative and Pattern Painting"
Security Pacific Plaza
Los Angeles
1981
"Professors' Choice"
Montgomery Gallery
Pomona College
Claremont, CA
1981
"Three Painter from Los Angeles"
D.B.R. Gallery
Cleveland, OH
1982
"Roy Boyd Gallery at the Merwin"
Wesleyan University
Bloomington, IL
1982
"Drawings by Paintesr"
Long Beach Museum of Art
Long Beach, CA
1982
"35 Los Angeles Artists"
Nagoya City Museum
Nagoya, Japan
1982
"Fresh Paint: 15 California Painter"
San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art
San Francisco
1983
"Science and Prophecy"
White Columns
New York City
1984
"Contemporary Classicism"
California State University,
Los Angeles
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ballatore,
Sandy
"Expanding The Decorative"
Images & Issues
Vol. 2, No. 1, Summer 1981,
pp.66-71
Ibid, "Los Angeles: Don Sorenson at Copley and Wilder"
Art in America
Vol. 64, No. 5, September 1976,
p. 115
Gardner, Colin
"Don Sorenson"
Images & Issues
Vo. 4, No. 3, Nov/Dec 1983,
pp. 26-27
Knight, Christopher
"Los Angeles Reviews"
Artforum
Vo. 26, No. 4, Dec. 1979,
p. 80
Muchnic,
Suzanne
"Los Angeles Artists' Group Show"
Artweek
Vol. 7, No. 34
October 4, 1976
Ibid. "Torchbearer On a ZigZag Course,"
Los Angeles Times
November 17, 1978
Pincus, Robert L.
"From Pattern to Imagery in Paint"
Los Angeles Times
August 25, 1981
Rosenthal, Adrienne
"Painting Dualities"
Artweek
Vol. 12, No. 16
November 25, 1978
Rubin, David
"Don Sorenson
Arts Magazine
February, 1979
Ibid, "Present Day Visionaries"
Artweek
Vol. 12, No. 16
April 25, 1981
pp. 5-6
Wilson, William
"Art Walk"
Los Angeles Times
January 24, 1975
Wilson, William
"Art Walk"
Los Angeles Times
June 18, 1976
Wilson, William
"The Galleries"
Los Angeles Times
April, 1981
Wilson, William
"The Galleries"
Los Angeles Times
October 12, 1981
Wortz, Melinda
"Wall Propinquities"
Artweek
Vol. 5, No. 6
February 9, 1974, p. 3
Ibid, "Don Sorenson Paintings 1976-1978"
Jim Murray, Editor
Mount St. Mary's College
Los Angeles, 1978
Ibid, "Don Sorenson"
Art News
Volume 82, No. 2
February, 1983
AWARDS
National
Endowment for the Arts grant, 1980
Young Talent Award
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984
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The Artist, 1977
from the Introduction
of the catalog
to the solo retrospective show at
Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, 1978
Don
Sorenson completed graduate school in 1973, a time when Modernist
rhetoric was losing favor and with it abstract painting. In spite
of art school pressures toward narrative, conceptual and installation
art, filtered down from the New York press, Sorensen remained firmly
committed to painting, a stance supported by one of his professors,
Peter Plagens. In his very literate graduate thesis written in 1973
in defense of painting, Sorenson stated
What
is needed now is a new structure— one that goes beyond the
ninety degree, vertical and horizontal grid. Our modernist epic
is drawing to a close, another structure is being formed, and it
appears we are on the threshold of the new.
Sorenson was
referring here to ideas outlined in George Kubler's book, The
Shape of Time. The young artist's search for a continuatively
viable vocabulary for painting has from the beginning incorporated
the structural format of Modernism— a grid structure and geometric
form— only to be subverted by gestural layering, splattering
and idiosyncratic coloration. With this painterly style Sorenson
deliberately creates spatial illusions that are antithetical to
the modernist dictum of truth to the flatness of the picture plane.
It is important for understanding his work to know the two basic parameters—
form and content— which inform his pursuit of a new structure.
Formally, the paintings are amalgams of the polar opposites with which
large stylistic swings in the history of art have been described:
intellect and emotion, order and randomness, control and accident,
structure and chaos, straight line and amorphous color, gloss and
matte, literal flatness and illusionistic depth, figure and ground
and so forth. It is through a synthesis of art history's past that
Sorenson finds his unique place in that history.
With regard
to content, Sorenson involves himself with painting because of its
potential for spiritual metaphor. In this regard he recalls Agnes
Martin's lecture at the Pasadena Art Museum in the early 1970's
as a pivotal influence, together with his art historical study of
writings by 20th century painters like Kandinsky, Mal evich and
Mondrian. Raised in a strict Lutheran family, Sorenson had experienced
ecstatic religious visions when he was a student and more recently
when practicing Zen meditation. "If I weren't an artist I would
probably be a monk," he says. However, having opted to "stay
in the world," he finds in painting an ecstatic and visionary
activity which which hints at, but is different from, his other
spiritual activities. Recently the specific spiritual metaphor comes
from Buddhist philosophy, particularly the unification of opposites
which lies beyond dualistic thinking.
Although Sorenson's
intense involvement with the act of painting is far removed from
the analytic and intellectual approach of minimal painters in the
1960's, it is hardly the case that his painting is all passion and
no control. On the contrary, his work is highly ordered and structured.
These characteristics are not necessarily visible in the paintings,
however, because the artist's system is so complex that it serves
ultimately to deny itself. The three series in this exhibition have
been completed in the last two years, 1976-78, The earliest "gestural"
series contains zig zag motifs and curves the diagonal lines, and
two densely brushed and dripped, intertwined backgrounds. In the
next "curved line" series Sorenson simplifies the background
by eliminating the double-layered gestures and drips, retains the
zig zags and curves the diagonal lines. In the most recent "zig
zag" group of painting the background remains simple and monochromatic
and the diagonal lines are eliminated, so that the sets of diagonally
opposed zig zags are the only remaining imagery.
It
is tempting to see this progression of three series as a process of
simplification, as one more element is removed with each group. However
other factors are added as well. The curge of diagonals in the middle
series is a new component which creates visual complexity. In the
recent series the zig zags are presented in groups of thick and thin
lines rather than singly. Thus it becomes difficult to say whether
the newest series is simpler or more complex than the earlier ones.
This condition is allied with the artist's philosophical belief, derived
from Buddhism, that enough complexity ultimately resolves into simplicity,
that beyond the constructions of dualistic thing they become one in
the same.
Since it is
virtually impossible to discern in the finished product the artist's
systematic process, it is instructive to indicate it here, especially
for the many viewers who tend to see Sorenson's painting as chaotic,
rather than an amalgam of structure and intuition. Each painting
in the gestural series represented here begins with the application
of a dark toned— black or blue— monochromatic but multi-valued
and highly modulated background. The second steps involves taping
and painting a series of diagonal lines, executed in a number of
idiosyncratic colors of roughly alternating warm and cool hues.
Thirdly a set of zig zag motifs, alternating thick and thin lines
and warm and cool colors, are taped and intertwined with each other
and with the first applied diagonal lines. At this point, exactly
half way through the painting's completion, a brushy, dripped, splattered
swirl of painterly texture twists and writhes it way in and out
of the more orderly taped motifs. Even the taped lines, however,
are not completely regular, for their bleeding edges are important
aspects of Sorenson's painting. In fact each line contains two and
often more layers of different colors, so that the underlying hues
seep through at the taped edges. Here at the halfway point Sorenson
has utilized six color for the first layer of diagonal lines. In
the color reproduction these are ivory, teal blue, beige, crimson,
green-gold and pale pink. Seven colors comprise the first set of
zig-zags— red, red-purple, sea green, turquoise, light green,
peach and gold; and four colors make up the gestural brushed areas—
blue-black, pink, dark blue and white. Altogether the first half
of the painting contains nineteen colors including the background,
but not including the several layers of each individual taped line.
Additional visual complexity comes from the artist's alternation
of matte and glossy surfaces which variably discernable as a function
of our angle of viewing and the ambient light.
Sorenson's
conceptual division of these paintings into two distinct halves derives
from his earlier work which utilized a collage of geometric shape
literally cut up and intertwined with its background. At this point
Sorenson feels that he does not need the collage, but that illusion—
anathema to Modernism but raison d' etre for much of Western painting—
will do just as well. As layers are added to the painting all the
underlying sections are taped, as well as the new lines being applied,
so that the strong illusion of complexly intertwined forms is developed,
and figure/ground distinctions are nearly obliterated.
Step five, following
the four-color gestures, is another row of diagonals (rust, dark
blue, green, gold, dusty pink and beige), followed by three zig-zags,
yellow-green, red-orange and purple. In each painting the last zig
zag applied, in this case purple, is the most saturated or flamboyant
hue and punctuates the painting. In a sense it serves as the painting's
"subject." Originally Sorenson chose the zig zag in an
iconoclastic mood, as a kind of Pop gesture.
Because of the
illusionistic layering it is impossible to decipher the step-by-step,
orderly procedure of the artist— he himself has trouble reconstructing
it once a painting is finished— so it is not surprising that
many people find the work troublingly fragmented and are not able
to penetrate the order coexisting with the break-up. In the second
series the painting contains seventeen rather than nineteen colors
and lacks gestural layers.
Color Plate
#2
Untitled, 1977, 69" x 144"
acrylic on canvas
Since organic
or gestural form is perceptually more complicated than geometric
form, we would logically expect this series to appear structurally
simpler than the preceding one. However, there are many more diagonal
lines in this painting, twenty-nine in the first set and twenty-eight
in the second. The upward curve of the diagonals brings an additional
element of visual dynamism to the already active nature of diagonal
movement. As a result the imagery of the series seems to be denser
than that of the gestural series, and the structure is more difficult
to decipher. For the record, it is as follows: The first diagonal
layer contains seven colors— mauve, Indian red, dark blue,
gold, turquoise, light gold, teal blue; the first set of zig zags
two colors— fluorescent yellow and red-violet; the second
layer of diagonals contains the same colors as the first, and the
second layer zig zags four— pale yellow, red-orange, bright
yellow and orange-pink. As with the first series, some diagonal
lines extend from edge to edge of the painting while others are
cut off in the center. Additional visual complexity results from
Sorenson's highly unorthodox color sensibility which is so unfamiliar
that is disconcerting for most viewers when it is just confronted.
In time I find it can be accommodated. Sorenson's commitment to
both idiosyncratic color and involuted composition has to do with
his desire to provide new perceptual structures and thus expand
our perceptual potential.
In
the most recent zig zag series, several of the paintings look relatively
monochromatic.
This
effect is exaggerated when the new work is seen in juxtaposition to
the earlier series, with their extraordinarily complicated reticulation
of color. In fact it is not accurate to call the predominately black,
white and blue painting of this series monochromatic, for the blacks,
white and blues are mixed with other colors creating a large rang
of hues. One of the most dramatic changes to occur in the transition
to this series is the new subtly of Sorenson's color relationships.
Rather than assaulting the viewer, the new paintings are more slowly
seductive. They are also much more responsive to their environment,
specifically the ambient light, for it is with changes in light that
the subtle variations in hue become perceptible.
Sorenson's
more closely related palette in the new series, together with the
elimination of the diagonal lines, once again create a deceptive sense
of relative simplicity. Certainly the subtler palette results in a
feeling of greater calm in comparison to the nervous energy of the
first two series seen here. This change is not simply a formal one,
but is directly reflective of a period of relative calm and serenity
in the artist's life. It is important to remember that even the most
non-objective art can easily deteriorate into empty decoration unless
it is informed by the artist's connection with his or her own "inner
necessity."
Nonetheless,
as we have repeatedly seen in Sorenson's work, every apparent simplification
is counterbalanced by an additional complexity. Thus in this series
the first layer of zig zags are executed in grouping of three—
a thicker line centered between two parallel thinner ones. A second
important component, new to this series, is the illusion of atmospheric
light which flickers through the paintings, in addition to the illusion
of layered or reticulated light.
The particular
quality of Sorenson's illusions of light and there concomitant symbiotic
relationship with ambient light relates his new painting, it seems
to me, to a uniquely Californian sensibility. A large number of
Southern California artists who either create illusions of light
or who utilize directly the natural light of the environment do
so because of the inspirational experience of actual light in nature.
Attentive viewers
will also discover that an elusive horizontal line, a metaphorical
horizon, bisects the newer paintings. Such references to nature,
however obscure, reflect Sorenson's latest violation of modernist
canon. In the context of illusionistic atmospheric light and a nearly
subliminal horizon line even Sorenson's zig zag imagery begins to
allude to nature in the form of lightning, rain or skies at night.
These allusions to nature are not unintentional. Their vestigial
representationalism acts as a complementary protagonist to the basic
non-objective character of Sorenson's painting. This representational/abstract
dichotomy is the newest of the artist's systematic pairing of stylistic
polar extremes in order to effect a new synthesis of art historical
parameters.
Sorenson's
continuing exploration of the potential of non-objective painting,
then, is integrally grounded in art historical consciousness shaped
by his personal philosophical beliefs and psychological experiences.
Cognescenti of modern art will readily recognize in Sorenson's work
the stylistic cliches which the artist combines in order to transcend
their established formularization. The dense and unexpected reticulation
of non-objective art's vocabulary and syntax in Sorenson's chaotic
structure demands both both intellectual and perceptual acuity of
the viewer. Without effort we will not discern the coexistnce of order
and chaos, romanticism and classicism, and other polar opposites in
the paintings. The confusing bipolarity of these paintings is created
for the sxpress purpose of setting an unfamiliar or unknown perceptual
structure for the viewer. It is Sorenson's belief that art can continue
to present the unknown in a manner that allows us to discover ourselves
through new perceptual experience. It is this belief that gives his
painting its power.
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