Untitled
Artist
Judith Streeter
(American, b. 1948)
Date1994
MediumOil | Mixed media | Panel
DimensionsOverall: 65 1/2 x 80 in. (166.4 x 203.2 cm)
ClassificationsContemporary art
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds provided by the Hauser Fund at Community Funds, Inc.
Object number95.1
Terms
- Abstract
Collections
On View
Not on viewLabel TextJudith Streeter American (b. 1948) Untitled, 1994 Oil and mixed media on panel Museum purchase with funds provided by the Hauser Fund at Community Funds, Inc. 95.1 The spare, near "empty" composition and somber, contemplative mood of Judith Streeter's Untitled reveal the legacy of classic minimalist abstraction as found in the canvases of Mark Rothko (see illustration). Yet while Rothko's vaporous color fields show little trace of the artist's hand, Streeter aggressively works her panels, incising, scraping, and gouging the surface to engage the viewer's eye. Among her largest and most ambitious works, Untitled reveals much of her signature imagery. The painting is composed of broad vertical and horizontal color zones broken and expanded by cruciform shapes and marked at the center by a vertical fissure that seemingly threatens to split the painting apart. The crosses, Streeter contends, have no traditional religious significance, but are meant instead as "signs of duality," as "crossroads" where the physical and transcendent intersect. Using these "signs of duality" as points of entry, the viewer is encouraged to move beyond the rich physicality of Streeter's surface to contemplate the ineffable beneath. What results is a work of both funereal foreboding and deep, reflective calm that, again, serves to update and expand the dark aura of Rothko's art at the end of the twentieth century.
