Bass Museum Vanishing Points

Featuring paintings from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Vanishing Points is an exhibition that explores how we perceive painting today as it relates to the history and continued viability of the medium. The exhibition presents three viewpoints: Sweeping Horizontality and Aerial Views, The Painterly without Paintings, and Impossible Task. Sweeping Horizontality and Aerial Views analyzes paintings that present stretched perspectives and linear structures that are often associated with cinema. The Painterly without Paintings describes the extreme edge where the medium of painting itself vanishes. That is, where color leaves the canvas behind without divesting itself of the painterly. Operating as a third vanishing point, Impossible Task, examines the “impossible” phenomenon of paintings that unravel Western perceptions of cosmological and idiosyncratic order.

The juxtaposition and connections of myriad perspectives; points that vanish into the distance, vibrant colors and light, interpreted by 27 local and international artists, is a contemporary exhibition at the Bass Museum, under Executive Director and Chief Curator, Sylvia Karman Cubiñá. Curated by artist, writer, Gean Moreno: “A vanishing point is one of the elements that help organize traditional perspective. I’m using it in an ironic way, proposing that the very idea of perspective, and the world that invited us to imagine it, is vanishing.” The collection was presented by patrons Debra and Dennis Scholl.

Exhibition ran from August 5 through October 30, 2011.