One of the original Ferus Gallery artists, Craig Kauffman is best known for his sensuously painted plastic hybrids between painting and sculpture made in the late 1960s. Associated with both the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements based in Southern California, Kauffman – like many of his SoCal contemporaries – to a great degree faded from public view in the 1980s and 1990s. Only with the rise of Los Angeles as one of the major centers of contemporary artistic production in the 1990s and early 2000s has major attention been directed once again to an earlier generation of LA artists including Kauffman as well as Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, Larry Bell, John Baldessari, Ed Kienholz, and others.
Over the past five years the departments of Modern and Contemporary Art have pursued important acquisitions by southern California artists of the 1960s and 70s, to build on an existing strength of our holdings and to make LACMA the standout collection of this material. Since then, we have been able to acquire significant works by James Turrell, Ed Kienholz, Eleanor Antin, Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, and others.
Kauffman’s Untitled, 1969 (from his loop series is a major work from this period. The works in Kauffman’s loop series (each a different color or combination of two colors) function as both painting and sculpture and seem to hover in space, suspended as they are out from the wall. His use of industrial fabrication techniques for the bent plastic of Untitled, combined with his traditional painterly use of color, allowed Kauffman to achieve what noted art historian and critic Barbara Rose has called, “a kind of abstract eroticism that is purely visual.” (Carol Eliel, Curator Modern Art)
