Solo Exhibition
Peter Forakis
Slots & Strides: Explorations of the Cube
Exhibition Dates: Dec 2- 23 and continues to Jan 4-Jan 15, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 4, 3- 5 p.m. A memorial to commemorate the anniversary of the artist’s death in November, 2009.
Preceded by a Special Reading of the new play "Love in space-time: a re-memory in 12 scenes" written and directed by Gia Forakis -1:30-2:45pm.
Read more about Forakis on out TOGONOW blog
The Togonon Gallery is honored to present Slots and Strides: Explorations of the Cube. The exhibition features sculptural works, sketches and proposals from one of America’s foremost mid-century artists and Bay Area native, Peter Forakis. San Francisco Chronicle Art Critic Kenneth Baker credits Forakis as the "originator of geometry-based sculpture from the 60s”. The works assembled at the Togonon evidence an exceptional 50-year career commencing with his seminal works from the 1960’s as a co-founder of the Park Place Gallery (1963-67) with his investigation of Euclidian based geometry and 4- dimensional theories.
“Slots and Strides” displays actual pieces as well as unrealized dreams for large scale public art never exhibited before. The exhibition allows a rare examination of Forakis’ thinking, processes and techniques linking 2-dimensional media to his 3 and 4-dimensional ideas and sculptures. With this overview we can see connections which have eluded previous viewings of his works: relationships between cubes, triangles, hypercubes, tetrahedrons, and rhomboids, as well as shape shifting constructions which challenge the viewer’s preconceptions of temporal and special boundaries. With the Stride-series (early 1980’s) what at first appear simply as 3 lines in space are revealed as virtual DNA molecules of 4-dimensional geometry, capable of mutating their identity in unexpected ways before the viewers eyes.
Forakis’ works are in such collections as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Oakland Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Museum, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and in numerous private collections.
About the artist:
Peter Forakis was born in 1927 in Hanna, Wyoming to Greek immigrants. He grew up in Oakland and Modesto, California. After military service in Korea, he attended the California School of Fine Arts from 1955 to 1957. Forakis was a member of the avant-garde Six Gallery in San Francisco, and after moving to New York in 1958, he co-founded the co-op Park Place Gallery (1963-1967) with five other California artists including Mark di Suvero, Leo Valledor, and Dean Fleming, It was in the context of Park Place that Forakis developed his pioneering exploration of geometry and complex space. His works of this period were included in the landmark exhibitions Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York (1966) and Sculpture of the Sixties show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1967). In 1967 Forakis was commissioned by Texas developer Angus Wynn to create Atlanta Gateway to serve as the entrance marquee to the Great Southwest Industrial Park in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the tallest steel sculpture ever created to that point.
Peter Forakis died on November 26, 2009 from complications of pneumonia. He was 82.
About the curator:
Jozeph is the son of Peter Forakis. He grew up inside the experimental geometric universe of his father’s sculptures, paintings and drawings. As a young boy he spent countless hours watching his father at work in his studio, spellbound as his Dad would magically materialize ideas from nowhere and then immortalize them in steel. At an early age he started assisting his father with his monumental steel sculptures, a periodic yet important collaboration that continued until shortly after Jozeph went to Italy for graduate school. Today Jozeph Forakis is an internationally recognized designer living in Milan with clients such as Epson, Foscarini, Fujitsu, Kikkerland, LG Electronics, Magis, Swarovski, Swatch, Tecno, and Yamaha Motors. His work has been exhibited around the world, and was included in the historic exhibitions “Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design” and “Workspheres”, both at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where it now forms part of the Permanent Collection. Jozeph was born in New York City, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and Masters of Industrial Design from the Domus Academy in Milan. (www. forakis.com) |
