Details — Click to read
Shaped wood, 1988, hand-painted with acrylic in colours, signed and numbered from the edition of 175 (plus 18 EA), published by Circle Fine Art Corporation, Chicago, 70×10×34.5 cm.
Axo 99 is ameeting place of all the mediums and movements Vasarely executes best; op art, sculpture, vibrant colours, cubism and surrealism. Produced towards the end of his career, we can see in this piece the knowledge and expertise from different schools of art that Vasarely accumulated and absorbed into his own artistic practice.
Vasarely first began to experiment with textural effects, perspective, shadow and light, and his early graphic period saw rise to his famed Zebras (1937), Chess Board (1935) and Girl-power (1934). From 1944, Vasarely experimented more with Cubism and Surrealism, developing a unique style earning him exhibitions in galleries Denise René (1946) and René Breteau (1947). His acclaimed works Self Portrait and The Blind Man are associated with this moment in his career. From 1947, Vasarely became increasingly interested in Op Art, famously producing his group of works Gordes/Cristal.
From his Gordes work, Vasarely began to developed his kinematic images, superimposed acrylic glass panes creating impressions of dynamism dependent upon the viewpoint. Vasarely became a prominent figure among kinetic artists, exhibiting alongside Man Ray at the Denise René gallery in the exhibition Le Mouvement. In October 1967, designer Will Burtin invited Vasarely to present at his Vision conference at New York University, which proved to be a seminal moment in Vasarely’s development of his ideas on visual kinetics. In 1970, Vassarely opened his first dedicated museum with over 500 works, and built the Foundation Vasarely which was inaugurated in 1976 by Georges Pompidou, the French president at the time. In the same year, Vasarely’s large, kinematic object Georges Pompidou was installed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, coinciding with his huge donation of his works to the Vasarely Museum in Pécs. In 1987, the second Vasarely museum was established in Zichy Palace in Budapest, to which he donated a large repository of his work thought to exceed 400 items. This was the moment in his career which gave rise to Axo 99, which overlays hand painting and traditional sculpture with optical illusionary technique, culminating in these two unique pieces.
