David Richard Gallery Presents "Post-Op: 'The Responsive Eye' Fifty Years After", The First In A Series Of Exhibitions Reviewing Seminal MoMA Exhibition

Post-Op: 'The Responsive Eye' Fifty Years After, the first in a series of presentations commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the ground-breaking “Op Art” exhibition organized by William C. Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art, focuses on the aesthetic pursuits and choices during the careers of a select group of American artists who were included in The Responsive Eye. Post-Op and its successor exhibits examines the “roster” of artists from that seminal exhibition and compares and contrasts those artists’ endeavors both during and after the Op Art "craze” of the mid-1960s. The later-career work featured in the current Post-Op exhibition spans the 1970s through 2015.

Post-Op: 'The Responsive Eye' Fifty Years After inaugurates a series of shows planned by the David Richard Gallery critically analyzing and reconsidering The Responsive Eye, which debuted at MoMA in February of 1965 and traveled to several American venues over the course of a year. David Richard Gallery’s Post-Op sequence is organized by art historian, curator and critic Peter Frank and gallerist, historian and curator David Eichholtz.

Featuring more than 34 objects by 17 artists, Post-Op: 'The Responsive Eye' Fifty Years After focuses primarily on the artists and their interests in visual perception and less on the cultural phenomenon of Op Art per se. The exhibition will feature artwork by the following artists, all participants in “The Responsive Eye”:

Richard Anuszkiewicz
Hannes Beckmann
Karl Benjamin
Ernst Benkert
Francis Celentano
Thomas Downing
Lorser Feitelson
John Goodyear
Francis Hewitt
Leroy Lamis
Mon Levinson
Alexander Liberman
Ed Mieczkowski
Oli Sihvonen
Julian Stanczak
Peter Stroud
Tadasky
among others to be announced

Most of the artists featured in this exhibition explored issues of visual perception throughout their careers, using combinations of line, color interactions, and kinetics with diverse approaches and a variety of media to engage and challenge viewers mentally and visually. Certain artists left the geometric formal vocabulary generally favored by Op artists, pursuing gestural abstraction and material-based explorations. But they still maintained color sensibilities rooted in the Bauhaus teachings of Albers and Itten.

Subsequent exhibitions in 2015 will shift to include artwork by artists who capture the “spirit” of The Responsive Eye. The second exhibition will include American artists who were also creating “perceptual art” at the time as that historic presentation but were not included in that exhibition. The early-career artwork of these artists, challenging viewers’ perception, will be presented alongside the early work of artists who were included in the 1965 MoMA show. The third exhibition will feature artwork by contemporary artists who continue to push art into the perceptual realm with new materials and technologies that create visual sensations, immersive experiences, and viewer-active engagement. That exhibition will also feature later-career and contemporary work by artists from The Responsive Eye. The final installment of this series will turn to the international artists from Europe and Latin America who constituted a major component of that exhibition, bringing Constructivist tradition, a “concrete” aesthetic, and an experimental and often collaborative ethos to the discourse of perceptual art.