NORMAN ZAMMITT

Celebrated by John Baldessari, his classmate at the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis College of Art and Design), Zammitt was a key yet under-historicized figure in the development of Los Angeles’s Light and Space movement alongside the likes of Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and Mary Corse. In 1964, Zammitt initiated a series of transparent, laminated rectangular sculptures, which interact with natural luminescence to create astonishing abstract visual effects. Nearly a decade later, in 1973, still enthralled by the transcendental California light, he began the Band Paintings for which he is best known, a suite of ethereal works based on a logarithmic system of color progression developed by the artist.

The mathematically-calculated transitions between hues of the Band Paintings smooth their hard edges into meditative spaces reminiscent of sunsets and landscapes. In the Fractal series that followed in 1988, he applied these same color theories to looser, more improvisational abstract compositions inspired by chaos theory and formally resembling the titular class of geometric forms. Zammitt employed mathematical precision in hue to spiritual ends, building a body of work which resonates optically on the wavelength of the divine.

^{Text courtesy Karma}