Bio
1 Union Sq. South
New York, New York 10003
Phone: 646-352-1864
hap.tivey@gmail.com
Hap Tivey began creating light installations and sculptures during the late sixties in Los Angeles. By 1973 he had made dozens of outdoor light works in the desert outside Palm Springs and a complex of interior light spaces that he exhibited in his Pasadena studio. These early creations reflected the influence of L.A. light artists such as James Turrell, with whom he collaborated on large-scale search light structures. During the 70’s he produced a large body of light installations in public galleries that invited viewers into large fields of undifferentiated light, where they experienced intensely saturated color with apparently infinite depth. Many of those works produced the impression of looking into deep cloudless skies, and in the case of the Irvine and Spring Street Situations, the viewer was literally enveloped by that empty light.
His first commercial exhibition in New York at Blum Helman moved that impression of infinite light into the rectangle and onto the wall with a painting format that presented a surface of light rather than a surface of paint. In this new portable field, the viewer encountered the brilliant saturated colors of earlier installations only as auras that hovered around primary shapes of shifting silver light in a field of darkness. During the eighties, his shows at Blum Helman, Landau-Alexander, Margo Leavin and Elizabeth Leach expanded that palette of light into a full range of colors that maintained a sense of infinite light within a soft matte surface. The luminosity within the paintings was the result of ambient light in the room and would change with the time of day, type of illumination source, and position of the viewer. The works retained the interactive characteristic of the installations on a subtler scale.
Following the Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition, more of the gallery pieces found their way into shows and collections, and Tivey spent less time making public light installations and focused on creating a sculptural format that used the same materials as the paintings, but included a light source within the structure. Two important installations evolved during that period, the DeMenil house and the Picasso tearoom. The first was a dark light installation created for the ground floor of Christophe DeMenil’s Frank Gehry house. It involved columns of light hovering over surfaces of water in a darkened room. The second, created for Claude Picasso in his La Villette studio outside Paris, employed the same surface used on the sculptures for one wall of the room. At particular hours of the day, it allowed sun projections to articulate a sculptural structure embedded in the field of light. The Diane Brown show in New York saw a shift in Tivey’s presentation of light from an actual encounter to an abstraction of theoretical light and an illusion of luminosity. The Prudential Collection acquired most of that suite of paintings, the “Myth of the Machine”, with the remainder going to Elizabeth Leach and collectors in the Northwest.
Tivey continued the development of light sculptures into the nineties, and as the computer’s graphic power evolved, he developed a technique of using pen-plotting machines to create images on light sensitive surfaces. These new images had the interactive properties of the earlier light paintings and sculptures, but like holograms shifting around and through fixed images, the light was pure refracted color, intensely saturated and responsive to the slightest movement of viewer or source. Digital imaging techniques developed during that time led to a series of video installations. The first series, presented in southern France, used a cave that had been sporadically inhabited for roughly five thousand years. Viewers entered the cave and after adapting to the darkness found one wall animated by digital projection. This exhibition continued for four years and evolved into the Origins project that spanned the next five. Origins consisted of almost an hour of animated images visually describing the theoretical beginning and condition of the universe. It presented a video projection on large multilayered screens and was accompanied by a suite of prints.
In 2004, Tivey returned to the format of the luminous painting with an installation at the new Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Since that time, he has created a new body of work that explores the potential of mixing LED sources and paintings surfaces. The new work returns to his early presentation of light as a tangible presence in painting and sculpture. The subdued, almost encaustic colors, of the seventies and eighties have been replaced by purer hues, not as spectral as the digital light, but expressive in a greater range of values and tonalities. The infinite space of sky light dominates this work, but the structures resonate between solid forms and empty fields. This last body of work distills many of the techniques and subtleties he discovered during the previous three decades into simple powerful statements of pure light.
In two of his most recent installations, he returned to large-scale presentations of light as embodied shapes in space. The “White Eclipse” and the “White Ellipse” presented beams of light in haze that described an inversion of the projected shadow of an eclipse and cones of light created by streams of particles.
For more than thirty years, Tivey's art has investigated the phenomena of light. In installation, painting, sculpture and projection, he pursued the concrete experience of light as well as the emotional and theoretical implications it holds for the human condition.
His first commercial exhibition in New York at Blum Helman moved that impression of infinite light into the rectangle and onto the wall with a painting format that presented a surface of light rather than a surface of paint. In this new portable field, the viewer encountered the brilliant saturated colors of earlier installations only as auras that hovered around primary shapes of shifting silver light in a field of darkness. During the eighties, his shows at Blum Helman, Landau-Alexander, Margo Leavin and Elizabeth Leach expanded that palette of light into a full range of colors that maintained a sense of infinite light within a soft matte surface. The luminosity within the paintings was the result of ambient light in the room and would change with the time of day, type of illumination source, and position of the viewer. The works retained the interactive characteristic of the installations on a subtler scale.
Following the Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition, more of the gallery pieces found their way into shows and collections, and Tivey spent less time making public light installations and focused on creating a sculptural format that used the same materials as the paintings, but included a light source within the structure. Two important installations evolved during that period, the DeMenil house and the Picasso tearoom. The first was a dark light installation created for the ground floor of Christophe DeMenil’s Frank Gehry house. It involved columns of light hovering over surfaces of water in a darkened room. The second, created for Claude Picasso in his La Villette studio outside Paris, employed the same surface used on the sculptures for one wall of the room. At particular hours of the day, it allowed sun projections to articulate a sculptural structure embedded in the field of light. The Diane Brown show in New York saw a shift in Tivey’s presentation of light from an actual encounter to an abstraction of theoretical light and an illusion of luminosity. The Prudential Collection acquired most of that suite of paintings, the “Myth of the Machine”, with the remainder going to Elizabeth Leach and collectors in the Northwest.
Tivey continued the development of light sculptures into the nineties, and as the computer’s graphic power evolved, he developed a technique of using pen-plotting machines to create images on light sensitive surfaces. These new images had the interactive properties of the earlier light paintings and sculptures, but like holograms shifting around and through fixed images, the light was pure refracted color, intensely saturated and responsive to the slightest movement of viewer or source. Digital imaging techniques developed during that time led to a series of video installations. The first series, presented in southern France, used a cave that had been sporadically inhabited for roughly five thousand years. Viewers entered the cave and after adapting to the darkness found one wall animated by digital projection. This exhibition continued for four years and evolved into the Origins project that spanned the next five. Origins consisted of almost an hour of animated images visually describing the theoretical beginning and condition of the universe. It presented a video projection on large multilayered screens and was accompanied by a suite of prints.
In 2004, Tivey returned to the format of the luminous painting with an installation at the new Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Since that time, he has created a new body of work that explores the potential of mixing LED sources and paintings surfaces. The new work returns to his early presentation of light as a tangible presence in painting and sculpture. The subdued, almost encaustic colors, of the seventies and eighties have been replaced by purer hues, not as spectral as the digital light, but expressive in a greater range of values and tonalities. The infinite space of sky light dominates this work, but the structures resonate between solid forms and empty fields. This last body of work distills many of the techniques and subtleties he discovered during the previous three decades into simple powerful statements of pure light.
In two of his most recent installations, he returned to large-scale presentations of light as embodied shapes in space. The “White Eclipse” and the “White Ellipse” presented beams of light in haze that described an inversion of the projected shadow of an eclipse and cones of light created by streams of particles.
For more than thirty years, Tivey's art has investigated the phenomena of light. In installation, painting, sculpture and projection, he pursued the concrete experience of light as well as the emotional and theoretical implications it holds for the human condition.
1 Union Sq. South
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Selected Group Exhibitions
Albright Knox Museum, "New Drawings New York", Buffalo, NY 1981 Alliance Francaise, New York, "Lacoste" 2000" * Aqua, Miami. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Audrey Stohl, " Artists from Blum Helman", Memphis, Tenn. 1979 Baltimore Museum, "Installation Drawings", Baltimore, Md. 1984 Bellevue Museum, "The Texture of Light", Seattle Wash. 2001* Bernard Jacobson, "Flying" New York, NY 1984 Blum Helman, "Recent Paintings", New York, NY 1978 1982 Brooks Memorial Museum, “Vogel Collection”, Memphis, Tenn. 2009 California State College, "Light", Fullerton, Calif. 1979 Carl Solway, Cincinnati, Ohio 1986* Cavalaire "Exhibition de Luminaire", Cavalaire, France, 2001 Contemporary Art Center, "Dynamix", Cincinnati, Ohio 1982 Diane Brown, Gallery Group, New York, NY 1984 1985 ELAC, "Energie New York", Lyon, France 1979 Elizabeth Leach, Portland, Ore. 1975 1978 1981 1983* 1985 1988* 19911993 1994* 1997, 2002, 2005, 2009, 2011 Exit Art, New York, 2007 Fashion Institute of New York, "Light", New York, NY 1987* Fisher Art Gallery, Bard College, New York, 2000, 2011 GCCA, "Technology", Catskill, New York 1993 Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 2009 Hofstra University, "Light", Hempstead, NY 1983* Hochman Gallery, "Light", New York, NY 1981 Indianapolis Museum of Art, "Biennial", Indiana, Ill. 1980 Jack Tilton, New York, NY 1983 1986 Koplin Gallery, "NY in LA", LA, Calif. 1982 Lacoste Gallery, " Faculty Show" 1998, 1999 Margo Leavin, "Gallery Group", LA, Calif. 1982 Montgomery Gallery, LA, Calif. 2012 Museum of New Art, "Detroit International Video Festival", Detroit, Michigan, 2003 Morris Museum, "Light", Morristown, New Jersey 1983* Neuberger Art Museum, "NY/LA Shift", Purchase, NY 1983* Newport Art Museum, "NY/LA Shift", Newport, Calif. 1982* Okum-Thomas, "Blum Helman Artists", St. Louis, Mo. 1981 Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Portland, Ore. 1993 - 1994* Philadelphia Museum, "Drawings for Installation", Philadelphia, PA 1985 Philadelphia Museum, "Vogel Collection", Philadelphia, PA 2010* Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, "The Quality of Light", Pittsburgh, PA 1988* Portland Museum of Art, “Vogel Collection”, Portland, 2011 Turner Gallery, LA, Calif. 1993 University of Colorado Art Gallery, "Visiting Artists Collection”, Boulder, Co. 1992* Woodstock Film Festival,"Annual Expo", Woodstock, New York, 2002, 2004 Detroit MONA, "Detroit International Video Festival", Detroit, 2003, 2005, 2007 Selected Bibliography It Happened At Pomona, Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969- -1973, McGrew, Rebecca, Getty Museum Publications, 2011 The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009 The Art of Light and Space, Butterfield, Jan, Chptr 10, Abbeville Press, New York, 1993 * Luminous, Wallace, pp. 32-38, Abbeville Press, New York, 2000 Shift L.A./N.Y., Schimmel, Paul, pp.14, 62-64, Gardener/Fulmer, Buena Park, Calif. 1982 Rooms P.S.1. Heiss Alanna P. 90, The Institute for Urban Resources, New York, 1977 Artforum, (Oct. 1976) "Apotheosis for a Crummy Space" Nancy Foote Artforum, (Dec. 1979) "Hap Tivey: Blum Helman Gallery" Tor Seidler Art in America, (July, August 1976) "Hap Tivey at Irvine", Sandy Ballatore Art in America, (March 1979) "Hap Tivey at Blum Helman", Prudence Carlson Art in America, (January 1985) "Hap Tivey at Diane Brown", Garvit, Henry Art News, (Summer 1976), "Dizzy in a Ganzfield, Hap Tivey", Perlmutter, Elizabeth Art News, (Summer 1979), "Hap Tivey", Melinda Wortz Art News, (January 1983), "The LA/NY Shift", Melinda Wortz Art News, (January 1985) "Hap Tivey at Diane Brown", E.H. Arts, (Dec. 1979) "Hap Tivey - Apollonian Gold and English Fog", Jane Nisselson Artweek, (June 1974) "Pasadena Studios - Hap Tivey" Artweek, (April 1976 ) "Hap Tivey, Fourth Situation" Artweek, (Oct. 1977) "Experiencing the Ephemeral" Artweek, (May 1982) "Koplin Gallery, Hap Tivey" Artweek, (Sept. 2004 ) "SBCAF, Hap Tivey" Journal: LA Institute of Contemporary Art, 1977, "Asians, a Description" Le Journal, (Feb. 1982) "Energie New York", Carador, Christine Les Arts, (Jan. 1982) "Energie New York a'l'ELAC de Perrache, Rene' Deroudille L'Express, (Feb. 1982) "Lyon, Les Punks de Manhattan" L’Monde, (August 1999) “Cavalaire Luminaire” New York (Nov. 1978) " The Art Establishment: Rising Stars vs. the Machine", Carter Radcliffe Oregonian (Jan. 2008) “Light as Path to Infinity”, Brian Libby Seattle Post Intelligencer (Dec 2000) " BAM: Light an Important Actor", Charles Ward Soho News, (Oct. 1978) "Hap Tivey, Making Light", Gerald Marzorati The Los Angeles Times, (May 30, 1980) "The Galleries - Tivey" Suzanne Muchnic The Los Angeles Times, (April 30, 1982) "Gallery Reviews, Tivey", Robert L. Pincus The New York Times, (May 1997) "Artists at the Customs House", Glueck, Grace Vizon (Oct. 1989) "Hap Tivey", Beral Madra * Chapter ten provides a reasonable description of work from 197 through 1992. |
