- Artist or Maker
- Hap Tivey
United States, born 1947 - Title
- Cleveland
- Date Made
- 1980
- Medium
- Wax, gold leaf on linen
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 12 1/4 × 14 1/4 in. (31.12 × 36.2 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2024.51.1
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
Across a body of work that spans painting, sculpture, and projection, Hap Tivey has explored the perceptual experience of light as a viewer-engaged medium. Working from his knowledge of physics and his study of Zen Buddhism in Japan, Tivey harnesses the varying frequencies of light rays as metaphors for states of consciousness—what the artist calls “eccentric states of mind.”
Cleveland and Midway (M.2024.51.2), both from 1980, belong to a series of abstract drawings Tivey derived from aerial views of jetways across the Midwest. Using wax-based pastel—a novel medium in the early 1980s—layered and blended with acrylic pigment, he produced bright and intense fields of color that simulate the atmospheric effects of light viewed from above. In Midway, he overlaid interlocking geometric forms atop passages of searing red, evoking the crisscrossing runways of Chicago’s Midway airport. Cleveland, the more abstract of the two drawings, links the series more directly to the artist’s interest in the material transformation of light. Incorporating gold leaf at the drawing’s center, Tivey produced the emergence of a light cavity within a burning orange field, akin to the effect of a solar eclipse.
Frances Lazare
2024
