The Color Fields
@ Awake Cafe
1357 W. Chicago Ave
Opening Friday, June 2nd, from 6PM - 8PM
On view through Wednesday, August 30th
Please join us for the opening of The Color Fields, a summer-long display of abstract paintings by Frederick Walter Nitsch.
From the Artists Website:
My favorite obscure word is pareidolia. It refers to the human brain’s tendency to find or attribute visual patterns when presented with random physical stimuli. The most common examples of this are seeing shapes in clouds and finding a man in the moon. The larger umbrella under which pareidolia falls is known as apophenia, which refers to the assignment of meaning to meaningless data.
I first came across this concept when I was studying philosophy in graduate school, and it came up again when I started doing art shows in Chicago. Viewers of my work told me that they ‘saw things’ in my abstract work that I had never intended to be there: faces, bodies, mountains, waves. Over time, I began to understand how the blurring technique I was using could be employed intentionally to suggest, but never define, organic shapes. My paintings were functioning something like colorful Rorschach tests, and I liked this.
The imaginary spaces I create are defined as much by me as by the people who interpret my work, by the meaning they impose on the colors I have moved on the canvas, board, or paper. Sometimes I title pieces literally, i.e. based on something I see in them. But I will often title pieces with an emotionally evocative phrase with the goal of eliciting a (hopefully pleasant) struggle to reconcile the concept and the image.
I love making my art, but just as important to me is knowing that these pieces mean something to the people who see them, that they convey a mood or an idea or even a story.
Official Website
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Tags: Awake Cafe, Chicago, Frederick Walter Nitsch, The Color Fields, West Town
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