Artwork Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Ibram Lassaw (1913-2003) |
Title |
Continuity #1 |
Date |
1979 |
Medium |
Color lithograph |
Dimensions |
26 x 33 in. |
Description |
Ibram Lassaw was born, of Russian parents, in Alexandria, Egypt. His family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York in 1921. He learned traditional modeling, casting, and carving as a sculpture student at the Brooklyn Children's Museum and Clay Club, Brooklyn, and also took evening classes at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, New York while attending City College. Lassaw's encounter with avant-garde art in the International Exhibition of Modern Art (1926), organized by the Société Anonyme at the Brooklyn Museum, made a powerful impression on him. In 1938 he produced his first welded work. During the 1940s he experimented with cage constructions and with acrylic plastics, adding color to his sculptures by applying dye directly to their surfaces. Lassaw used oxyacetylene welding techniques in evolving his mature improvisational manner in the 1950s. His first solo show was held at the Kootz Gallery, New York, in 1951, and after that time he exhibited widely. Deeply interested in biology, cosmology, and religion, the artist studied Zen Buddhism at Columbia University, New York. His belief in the integrated nature of the universe informed the spatial concepts in his sculptural works, which he called open-space constructions, and his two-dimensional drawings and prints, including Continuity #1, with its labyrinthine structure and all-over rhythmic pattern. Gift ot Denise Lassaw |
Catalog Number |
2015.008 |
Object Name |