"Andy Goldsworthy: Mountain and Coast Autumn into Winter"
2004-06-19 until 2004-09-19
Tacoma Art Museum
Tacoma, WA, USA United States of America

Tacoma Art Museum opens a nationally traveling exhibition of large-scale photographs and sculptures by internationally acclaimed British artist Andy Goldsworthy Saturday, June 19. Andy Goldsworthy: Mountain and Coast Autumn into Winter highlights the artist’s distinct style of expressing nature and nature’s rhythms in contemporary art. Mountain and Coast Autumn into Winter presents 34 of Goldsworthy’s photographs that illustrate the many temporary site-specific sculptures that he created in the Japanese countryside during the Fall and Winters seasons there in 1987. The exhibition also includes four of the artist’s sculptures made from materials such as Japanese chestnut leaves, river stones, and pine sticks and is on view at Tacoma Art Museum through September 19, courtesy of the Haines Gallery, San Francisco, California, and the artist.

Goldsworthy constructs his stunning creations in the landscape from materials found in the environment – for example, a stitched chain of vividly red maple leaves, placed in a long curving line threaded around rocks in a creek bed. He intends for his works to return to nature, however, before they are washed away by the water’s current or disappear in the wind, he photographs the sculptures to create a permanent record of his work.

“For Goldsworthy, a weaving of wood or an arrangement of ice blocks are his eloquent creations, made on the spot in the woods or field,” remarks Tacoma Art Museum Chief Curator Patricia McDonnell. “He creates an art of lyrical beauty that animates our awareness of nature’s forms and processes, as well as life’s temporary reality.”

Goldsworthy is a part of the land-art or earthworks movement born in the late 1960s and 1970s which includes notable artists such as Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Robert Smithson, and James Turrell. These artists created works from nature’s raw materials outdoors and away from gallery settings. Goldsworthy has had major one-person exhibitions nationally and internationally, including a current rooftop exhibition on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through October 31, 2004.

Visitors to Tacoma Art Museum’s Mountain and Coast Autumn into Winter can create an intimate connection to Goldsworthy’s art by experimenting with their own temporary sculptures in the Open Art Studio or by viewing the award-winning documentary Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time in the museum’s Event Space. This recent film by Thomas Reidelsheimer explains the process, content, and significance of the artist’s work.

IMAGE
Andy Goldsworthy
Woven bamboo, windy...,
Before the Mirror
1987
photoograph

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of Washington

Other Important Exhibitions in Washington