- Artist or Maker
- Ronald Davis
United States, California, Santa Monica, 1937-2025 - Title
- Roto
- Date Made
- 1968
- Medium
- Polyester resin and fiberglass
- Dimensions
- 62 x 136 in. (157.48 x 345.44 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.69.8
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
Ronald Davis began his art career making gestural oil-on-canvas paintings but was soon inspired to explore geometric forms and optical illusions. In order to experiment with the representation of space, he needed a medium that allowed him to create unusual shapes and illusionistic depth, and that permitted the viewer to look at and intothe work simultaneously: polyester resin. Roto is from his second series of resin paintings, made in 1968–69, known as the Dodecagons, or twelve-sided forms. Roto’s composition appears both to recede from and extend into the viewer’s space.
Exhibition label: Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, Carol S. Eliel.
- Selected Bibliography
Barron, Stephanie, S. Bernstein and I. S. Fort, with essays by Stephanie Barron, Sherri Bernstein, M. Dear, Howard N. Fox and Richard Rodriguez. Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.
- Tuchman, Maurice. Ten Years of Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions: Inaugurating The New Contemporary Art Galleries. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1973.
Tuchman, Maurice. Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981.
- Eliel, Carol, editor. Light, Space, Surface: Art from Southern California. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: DelMonico Books, 2021.
- Copyright
- © Ronald Davis
