LAM’s Kuntz Exhibit Makes Critic’s Top 10
Laguna Art Museum’s retrospective on pop artist Roger Kuntz (on exhibit last year from March 1 through May 24) was named one of “the 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions” of 2009 by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight.
The exhibit, “Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction,” was singled out along with shows displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Guggenheim in New York and the Huntington Library.
“We did a retrospective on Kuntz because he was important nationally during the early ‘60s in L.A. when art went pop,” said Susan Anderson, the show’s curator, who also compiled and wrote a portion of the show’s 140-page hardcover, color catalog.
The show included Kuntz’s nationally acclaimed “Freeway Series” in which the artist fused the mundane – such as concrete canyons, signs and pedestrian spirals – with shadow and light. “He tried to find a ‘middle ground’ between abstraction and figuration and was a master of light and dark,” Anderson said. The show was the first retrospective of the artist since his death in 1975, and critic Knight said it put Kuntz’s “unusual paintings in revealing context.”
Kuntz spent the last 11 years of his life in Laguna Beach before he committed suicide at the age of 49.
