Michael Venezia, SPZ, 1972

1972

Medium

Metal pigments on canvas

Dimensions

30 × 30 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-156122

Michael Venezia's Spray Paintings iconic spray paintings on canvas were created in New York in the mid-1960s between 1966 and 1973. They thus coincide with a time when conventional art practice was being radically transformed by Minimal Art. Venezia, together with fellow artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, and Sol LeWitt, was searching for painterly possibilities beyond Abstract Expressionism - for this purpose, they abandoned traditional categories such as painting and sculpture and reduced the work of art to its elementary material and plastic aspects, such as material, color, and texture. The course of this new painting process and the resulting pictorial qualities repeatedly become an encounter with the unpredictable. The works from this period are characterized by their material autonomy and abstraction, underscoring Venezia's interest in the process-based nature of painting. The proportional relationship of the individual sprayed surfaces to one another and to the overall format is based on a conceptual system that is reinforced by the mechanical transfer of paint using the spray gun as a tool, thus fundamentally calling into question the personalized, painterly gesture.