Tag : Mulvane

Sam Ben-Meir * Topeka, Kansas (The Hawk): Dancing Waters is a new exhibition at Topeka’s Mulvane Art Museum, curated by museum director Connie Gibbons, and featuring the work of Rita Blitt, who has been making art consistently and diligently for over sixty years. In that time, Blitt has created a body of work of immense breadth and scope, encompassing thousands of drawings and paintings, as well as sculpture, from the monumental to the intimate, and even film. The current exhibition draws upon Mulvane’s extensive permanent collection to provide viewers with a synoptic appreciation of this prodigious and underexposed American artist. Dancing implies movement; and in Rita Blitt’s work the embodied, performative quality of tracing the line is an essential component. The terpsichorean aspect of Blitt’s art is irreducible to either technique or style: it is essential to both how she works, and more importantly, to how her paintings and sculptures work upon us. The saltant movement of water is realized in her expansive, bounding and fluid brushwork. For Blitt, water is not merely the inorganic chemical compound, but essentially elemental, the viscosity of the natural world – it is living and moving – and her engagement with water, this primordial stuff, is an engagement, or rather an embrace, of what the philosopher Merleau-Ponty would call the ‘flesh of the world,’ underscoring our ‘embodied connection to the spaces we inhabit deeply, primally, elementally’. Flesh involves not only water and its flows, but the air and its windy respirations, the earth with its forms and vicissitudes, and fire, as luminous and life giving as the sun. The exhibition commences with two large-scale paintings, Dancing Waters I (2001), and Dancing Waters I ...