354 North Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, CA 92651 USA
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ROBERT MAH
“The leap from a monochromatic image to a vivid colored one
has always opened eyes… To encounter Robert Mah’s most recent canvases in this exhibition, Open Spaces/Primary Colors, is to experience this leap. Even for those who didn’t see his 2007 show, The Spontaneous Process, the bold, primary colors that splash across his newest canvases immediately grab the eye.
“There is a performance aspect to these works – Mah painted them standing upright with the canvas horizontally on the floor. But these are not simply Jackson Pollock-esque action paintings. His abstract interplay of color and white spaces is more in the vein of Sam Francis, an artist whose work could look improvisational, even if his process was methodical and rigorous.
“There is a natural-ness to these new canvases, as if their patterns and shapes were seen under a microscope, at the same time that they seem to have been releases, or “let go” from Mah’s brush, like a butterfly freed from its puma.
“During his tenure as a professor of microbiology at UCLA, Robert Mah saw the beauty of the world at the cellular level – he also no doubt saw how beauty and function interacted together. In this work, we see an artist who knows how to render a sense of organic grace on canvas; and with his artistic training and compositional instinct, he also takes control of the paint to subtly shift, focus, and clarify the forms for our eyes. The colors are what dazzle us at first, but it’s the carefully constructed rhythms and sense of symmetry Mah orchestrates that keep us mesmerized.” –James C. Taylor
Mah was born in Fresno, California. At the University of California-Davis, he was formally educated in bacteriology and microbiology earning successively advanced degrees culminating in his Ph.D. in 1963. He also started painting seriously in 1963 while Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A change in career appointment brought him to UCLA in 1970. And he has been able to devote significant concentration on his abstract expressionist paintings since he retired from UCLA in 1995.
ROBERT MAH
Open Spaces / Primary Colors
Continuing until October 31, 2009
