Carlos Cruz-Diez is featured in Electric Op, a major survey of Op-Art at Buffalo AKG curated by Tina Rivers Ryan and open from 27 September 2024 through 27 January 2025.
In the mid-1960s, a new movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) art took the world by storm. These dizzying, dazzling artworks embodied the energy of the emerging Space Age: Op painters used electric colors and machine-like precision to make geometric patterns that seem to vibrate or move, while Op sculptors utilized new, futuristic materials such as Plexiglas and aluminum. Some created mechanical and electronic sculptures that actually do move, including many that use kinetic light. As art critic John Canaday wrote in 1965, Op artworks are “the only objects being created today, as art, that can compete with launching pads and industrial machinery as expressions of the character unique to our civilization.”
Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era.
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