A Day at Dia: Beacon

Next stop on my road trip...Dia: Beacon. This museum is the home of Dia Art Foundation's collection of art from the 1960's to the present. Located on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, NY, the museum is housed in a former Nabisco box printing factory that was redesigned by the artist Robert Irwin. It is impressive place to view an equally impressive collection of art.




I planned my trip to Dia: Beacon to see a temporary exhibit of one of my most favorite artists ever...Antoni Tapies. Tapies is a Spanish Catalan painter whose work tends toward abstract expressionism but truly transcends this approach. His artwork, though usually canvas-based, is highly sculptural and textural. He often incorporates marble dust and sand, and sometimes uses material and objects to create assemblages on his canvases. And he often adds numbers, letters, and sweeping gestural marks to his paintings. I first read about the exhibit here in the New York Times.

The exhibit, entitled "The Resources of Rhetoric", was well worth the trip. Unfortunately, Dia: Beacon allows absolutely no photography. (This is one of my pet peeves, as for me, viewing art in a museum or gallery seems incomplete if I cannot photograph it). However, several of the paintings in this exhibit were borrowed from the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona and I had photographed them on a visit there several years ago.




And just because I am so inspired by Tapies' work, here are a few more images not from this show, including an accordion book that was exhibited at MoMA:





I discovered the work of so many more amazing artists at Dia: Beacon. Again, as there was no photography allowed, I will post examples of the work of each artist from my own photographs that I have taken at other galleries, museums, and at Sotheby's, the auction house.

John Chamberlain: Creates freestanding and wall hanging sculptures from old automobile parts.



Louise Bourgeois: Sculptor of abstract and organic shapes. Also famous for her spiders, one of which was at Dia: Beacon. This photograph was taken at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.



Joseph Beuys: German artist who created performance art pieces as well as installations, paintings, sculpture, and assemblages. His work was often political and humanistic.



Gerard Richter: Diverse artist creating blurred figurative paintings, abstract paintings, and overpainted photographs.



Bruce Nauman: Artist working in a wide variety of media, including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance.



Richard Serra: The museum has several of his monolithic, 13-feet high, curved steel plates, which you can enter and/or walk through. I was most amazed by the "skin" of the steel, composed of a natural patina of peeling and velvety rusts, ochres, blues, browns, and greys. I have included some close-ups below taken from a previous posting from his show at MoMA.