With Michael Venezia (born 1935 in Brooklyn, US) and his rare works on paper, we present one of the most important innovators of painting in the 1960s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Venezia shared with fellow artists such as Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Sol LeWitt the desire to develop painterly possibilities after Abstract Expressionism. Around 1967, he was one of the very first visual artists to discover the paint spray gun, which virtually eliminates the handwriting of the brushstroke and instead makes air pressure visible. By filling his paint spray cans with a mixture of metallic pigments and acrylic or oil paint, Venezia also clearly focussed on the painterly quality of light. This is evident in the works on paper in our exhibition: they change optically depending on the incidence of light, giving them a dynamism that arises entirely from the interplay between the means of painting and light.

Please find more information about the artist and further works here.