Aesthetically, Los Angeles is mostly a mess. Unplanned, mismatched buildings mushroom among its grid of streets, whose orderly classicism is often disrupted by tectonically induced hills. Curbs crumble and sidewalks crack under telegraph poles festooned with cables. Fancy succulents are mixed with pure native plants.
What Los Angeles offers aesthetic perfection is mostly in its skies. Fascinating umbrellas of color rise from the horizon, even outside of its ‘golden hour’ – the famous dormant period before sunset – even without the fog that enhances these atmospheric special effects.
In the 1960s, many of this region’s most famous artists were inspired by the vault of the heavens rather than the harsh realities on the streets below. They favored new media, technologies often developed by the local aerospace industry. Traditional painting on canvas was often sidelined in favor of modern industrial materials such as cast resin, glass, lacquers and microfilm coatings.
Artist Norman Zammitt, a colorist who excelled as a painter, remains lesser known than his peers in the Light and Space movement. (The artist died in 2007.) Finally, a survey exhibition of Zammit’s art at the Palm Springs Art Museum takes visitors on a glorious tour through his color explorations.
Born in 1931 in Toronto, Zammitt moved to Southern California as a teenager. In the 1960s, he experimented with modern minimalist sculptures in acrylic resin and Plexiglas, but broke into his stride in the following decade with canvas paintings in what became his signature style: horizontal bands of acrylic paint, gradually shifting to shades so sickly as wonderful as they are.
This report entitled “Graduations” and edited by Sharrissa Iqbal, it starts well and gets better. Between the entrance walls painted in sunflower yellow, Zammitt’s panoramic painting ‘One’, from 1973, welcomes visitors. From a distance, the board also looks mostly yellow. But as you get closer, you’ll recognize colors from inky black, along the bottom, rising through dioxazine purple, orange, coral, orange, and then five or six different tones of yellow, in widening bands. Up close, the 16-foot-wide painting bathes you in radiant brightness.
“One” is Zammitt’s first large-scale iteration of what he would call “Band Paintings.” Turn to the gallery and you’ll see two more, both painted in 1975: “Green One” – reminiscent of a submarine rather than an aerial one – and “Arctic Yellow”. As time went on, the bands became thinner, the colors more subtly graduated, Zammitt’s surfaces more pristine and his effects more ecstatic.
Zammitt applied himself to his work with the precision of a workshop technician. According to a wall text, by the mid-1970s he had developed a “sophisticated mathematical system” for mixing his colors, weighing pigments according to curves on a chart. When I asked, Iqbal couldn’t fully explain this process, though she did reveal that in the 1980s Zammitt began working with mathematicians at the California Institute of Technology who showed him how computers could help him develop more complex variables. for his color maps. When desktop computers became affordable, he bought one and commissioned a custom program that allowed him to formulate color gradients.
On each side of the gallery are rows of smaller paintings, many only eight or nine inches wide, which appear to serve as studies for his larger works. Near most of the mighty paintings hang their mini-me companions. An exhibit of these small canvases—exquisite objects in their own right—recently opened at Karma in Los Angeles, and that gallery is credited, along with Zammitt’s estate, with most of the works for this exhibit.
The sky was not Zammitt’s only visual reference. A particularly dazzling painting from 1976, The North Wall, achieves holographic illusions of depth, its horizontal bands pulsating before our eyes. It brings to mind Mexican serape blankets or Native American weavings. Although he rarely advertised it, Zammitt’s mother was from the Mohawk Nation and the family spent time living in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, a First Nations reservation near Montreal before moving to California.
Iqbal speculates that Zammitt’s Native American heritage may have led him to see abstraction as a path to spiritual transcendence. The artist himself remained largely mute on the matter. An early laminated acrylic sculpture, its layers crammed with visually dazzling layers of rainbow dots, is titled “Caugnawaga II” — an alternate spelling of the shelter where Zammitt once lived — but the piece itself has no apparent connection to the culture of the Mohawks.
The exhibition contains an unexpected twist: In the late 1980s, Zammitt’s straight lines and flat color dissolved into what he called “Fractal” paintings. A spectacular example of this style is the most recent work in the show: ‘Triptych XI’, painted in 1992. It is a highly complex painting, an interlocking jigsaw of jagged forms, perhaps inspired by a coastline or a cloud, loosely painted in dark hues that they ascend into the blackness.
Why is Zammitt emerging from relative obscurity only now, in this artistic moment of generative AI and rejection, social activism and still lifes at the breakfast table? Perhaps Zammitt’s art strikes a chord because it transcends its historical period — and ours, too. Not only do his paintings look as fresh as they should when new, they take us out of our hectic and messy present, connecting us to the eternal.
Norman Zammitt: Gradations
Through Oct. 7, Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs, Calif., psmuseum.org.