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Artist Statement:
As Aristotle said, learning is
the greatest of pleasures. My
work reflects my journey to
acquire knowledge. Along the
way I have become a Janus.
Looking at life from one
direction, I see the terror of
chaos, man’s inhumanity to
man, mortality, and the
unknown. From another
direction, the ...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
2012 Late Ocrober-February,
2013: Major Exhibition,
Colorado Springs Fine Arts
Center, Colorado Springs,
Colorado
Recent Exhibitions
2006 Decades of Influence:
Colorado 1985-Present, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Denver,
Colorado
2005 American Standard,
one-man survey, Colorado
Springs Fine Arts Center,
Colorado (with funding from
the National Endowment for the
...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Coming Soon!
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Collections:
Denver Art Museum
Colorado Springs Fine Arts
Center
Kaiser Permanente Collection,
Denver CO
Walter O. Evans Collection of
African-American Art...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Floyd Tunson:
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Review <1
Westword: Denver CO
Arts & Entertainment
Michael Paglia
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Art
Top Marks
Abstraction lights up Sandy Carson, while postmodern is displayed at a darkened Pirate.
By Michael Paglia
Article Published Feb 3, 2005
Who / What:
Rudiments and Lines of Position and Andy Miller: When Does Something Qualify as Being Alive?
Details:
Rudiments and Lines of Position
Through February 26, Sandy Carson Gallery, 760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573- 8585
Andy Miller: When Does Something Qualify as Being Alive
Through February 6, Pirate: a contemporary art oasis, 3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058
"Untitled <110," by Floyd Tunson, acrylic on canvas.
If I were asked to come up with a list of the most significant contemporary artists working in Colorado, Floyd Tunson would not only be on it, but he'd be near the top. The Manitou Springs-based artist, who taught for decades as a high school art teacher in Colorado Springs, has been exhibiting his intelligent and accomplished neo-pop paintings, prints and installations since the 1970s. Coinciding with a major survey of his work of the last decade or so that's on display at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Denver's own Sandy Carson Gallery is presenting Rudiments, a solo made up of some of Tunson's recent abstracts. It's one of two single-artist shows at the gallery right now.
Many of the paintings in Rudiments are enormous, and several are on multiple panels. The influence of first-generation pop art has long been present in Tunson's work, and his signature style features photo-based representational imagery that often references the African-American experience. Among all the pop artists, Robert Rauschenberg, as Biety points out, is clearly the main source of inspiration for Tunson, and not only in these paintings. In a similar approach to Rauschenberg's, Tunson places images on top of one another. Another pop device Tunson employs is repetition. In some pieces, he uses dot patterns, and in others, rows of horizontal lines arranged in rectilinear shapes.
Though the paintings in Rudiments are abstract, there's clearly some kind of representational imagery underneath it all. The heroic "Untitled <111," hanging just beyond the reception area, has an almost photographic quality -- though it's impossible to tell what the subjects of the source photos were. People and things on which the likenesses are based are obscured by others that Tunson has stacked up on top of them. He also cuts up the images and reassembles them, thus rendering what would be recognizable unrecognizable. The images, as submerged as they are, do connect these abstracts to Tunson's more straightforwardly representational paintings. Over the decades, he's swung between abstraction and representation, often doing both simultaneously.
Taking over the north wall at the front of the gallery is "Untitled <110," which is ten feet high and fourteen feet wide. The painting is made up of four separate panels arranged in a grid, and it combines a lot of expressionism with a little representation. I can make out grotesque heads on either side and a fetus placed in the middle, though they may simply be organic shapes.
Sometimes Tunson is very didactic and succinct in conveying messages in his work, as in his famous series on black gang kids that's part of the show in Colorado Springs. In those paintings, which incorporate photocopy transfer, Tunson visually compares the youngsters to canaries in coal mines. To him, they are an early-warning system for society, the way the hapless canaries were for miners, warning them of impending asphyxiation by simply dropping dead. At other times, Tunson's meanings are ambiguous, as in the abstracts that make up Rudiments.
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