At the beginning of the 1950s, the two men met the precocious young Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), was was doing, among other things, blank white paintings intended to capture the ephemeral play of ambient light and passing shadows.
In museums every day people come into contact with blank, empty paintings.
(Artist take care: what if he'd name-checked Donny Osmond or Neil Diamond? What kind of slant would that have given the work?) Looking at The Muses, those old photos of the artist as a young man, interposing his own body next to the near-blank early paintings, come back as another faint echo.
For an artist with a confessed fear of blank spaces, whose paintings typically act as a vibrant backdrop to her complex installations, this "Solo Pintura" (meaning "only paintings") show is something of a rarity.
In other paintings, the blank suburban architectural structures that Ms. Dickson favors seem to float in a hazy mist.
His performances always strike me as paintings on a blank canvas.
The formal range is broad, from words scrawled on a blank page to intensively worked paintings and sophisticated graphics.
His recent exhibition of paintings, the Drawn Blank Series, in London's Mayfair may be followed by a travelling sculpture exhibition in Europe next year.
Among them are two paintings of open, blank books floating above palindromes (One says "STARBRATS"; the other "TULSA SLUT"), which complicate the usual left-to-right movement of English text with their strange symmetries.
The resulting garments will employ the simplified shapes Ms. Sarafpour favors, but ornamented in a way, she said, that resembles "paintings on a blank canvas, something abstract," part Mark Rothko, part Damien Hirst.
