TitleNative Fragments
Artist
Gyorgy (Gregory) Kepes
(1906 - 2001)
Date1972
MediumOil and sand on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 50 1/4 × 40 in.
Framed: 51 3/4 × 41 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.
SignedSigned on reverse: "Kepes 1972".
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 3, 1979
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1979.15
Label TextHungarian-born Gyorgy Kepes was perhaps best known as a photographer during the early part of his career and later as the founding director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kepes was born in Selyp, Hungary and as a boy he moved with his family to Budapest. In 1924, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, where he initially studied painting. While a student, Kepes became acquainted with a group of cultural and social revolutionary artists and poets who introduced him to avant-garde works of Russian Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism. He soon joined the group, known as "Munka" or "Work," and by the late 1920 this exposure to revolutionary ideals contributed to Kepes's abandoning painting altogether in favor of light-based media such as photography, photomontage, photograms, and film. He believed that these media most directly addressed the rapidity of change in modern life, yet as they relied on light for production, still retained an inherent connection to nature. Kepes moved to Berlin to work with Bauhaus artist and photographer Lázló Moholy-Nagy in 1930 and in 1937 immigrated to America to teach at the newly established Chicago Bauhaus. Kepes also became known as a theorist who, for the rest of his life, explored the relationship between art and science. The first of his many publications, Language of Vision (1944) was partially responsible for his appointment to establish a program in visual design at M.I.T in 1945. Kepes returned to painting around 1950 after nearly a two-decade absence and for the rest of his life created enigmatic works that often teeter on the edge of abstraction. In 1967 he founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T., where visual artists could work closely with scientists and engineers.
"Native Fragments" is a typical work by Kepes from the early 1970s with its earth tone palette and liberal application of sand. The artist often applied sand to a canvas in order to build up the surface and give it an inherent three-dimensionality. While this technique, combined with abstract elements, recalls similar practices by some Abstract Expressionists, Kepes's works lack impulsive gesture and instead appear much more methodical in their creation. "Native Fragments" illustrates the artist's interest in the dialectical nature of life. It recalls a landscape, and its topographical nature is at once reminiscent of both a macrocosmic aerial view and a revealed microcosmic world. Striving for the combination of seemingly disparate elements was a lifelong goal of Kepes and it was through his work that he hoped to communicate something about the universal human condition, noting in 1965 that "Artists are living seismographs, as it were, with a special sensitivity to the human condition. They record our conflicts and hopes, and their immediate and direct response to the sensuous qualities of the world help us to establish an entente with the living present."
