I visited the Cantor Arts Center museum in Stanford. I choose this museum because it looked somewhat modern and I didn’t want to go to a museum that had art work that I didn’t enjoy. The show was called the Figuration/Abstraction. It was mostly abstract works which varied from a big red box to a person that had a semi abstract background. There were lots of different artists in the show some were Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and even Pablo Picasso. So there were different works on display some sculpture and some interactive pieces but the main pieces were paintings. All of them had bright colors or were very unique.
I like abstract paintings because they are confusing at first glance but once you look and find the pieces it creates a painting that was hidden. The show also brought lots of different types of abstract works. Some were very plain and looked like it was a random thing while others were very complex. I didn’t like the very simple pieces. When some people might think of abstract they could think of a painting with one solid color. Those paintings and sculptures are abstract but they don’t look like work was put into them. So when the show put this in I thought it was going to be all plain but in reality abstract could be lots of diffrent things.
The one that spoke to me was a mixed media painting by Frank Stella. The mixed media painting is called Maxon’s Island and it was made in 1995. This work, from far away, looks like chaos but as I got closer it looked still like chaos but pieces were working together. The reason it is mixed media is because it had painted paper and different materials painted on to it. I liked the fact that it went from just paint to other forms of cloth and paper. When the artist did that it made the painting different that the others in the room. Also, I really liked it because it felt like a chaos but a chaos that was giving you a nice colorful hug. I enjoyed the way it was a abstract that wasn’t simple but was actually complex.
I think it was successful because it brought a lot of different ideas and pieces together. I would definitely recommend it to someone else because they would leave with something they liked because so many were different pieces. If they didn’t find something they liked the other part of the museum was different and fun to go through and look at. So I also recommend the museum too. The show made me question why there was such a diverse amount of artwork. Usually the artwork all seems put together but in this show there were wanted signs and candy and big red boxes. I would like to ask the curator why he or she put so many different things together. Over all I was happy to go to an art museum and glad that I got to go see the different shows.
