Don Giffin, Don Giffin Finish Fetish Abstract Alkyd Pigment Painting Los Angeles, California, 1999

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Don Giffin (American, 1948-2003)
Phone in the Desert, 1999
Mixed media painting
Hand signed Don Giffin, titled and dated (verso)
… Read more Don Giffin (American, 1948-2003)
Phone in the Desert, 1999
Mixed media painting
Hand signed Don Giffin, titled and dated (verso)
76 x 52 inches. (including frame)
This can hang either vertically or horizontally

Don Giffin, Born in Chicago in 1948, Giffin earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree at what is now Cal State Northridge. An abstract painter who expanded the Southern California modes of “color and light” and “finish fetish” art, melding impressions of photography, printmaking and painting into a single work.
Giffin, a master printmaker as well as a painter. In 1995 he mounted the first of his five solo exhibitions at the Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica. David Pagel described the artist’s work in a Los Angeles Times review as perfectly smooth, glass-like surfaces when viewed from afar that seemed to decay as one approached.
They make pain palpable and evoke mortality’s inevitability, Pagel wrote of Giffin’s creations, which used layers of paint, gesso and tar that he pulled apart as they dried. “His corporeal abstractions bypass your mind to hit you in the stomach.” Giffin was one of 10 Los Angeles, California artists whose work was featured in the 1997 Biennial of the Orange County Museum of Art. (including Robert Blanchon, Jessica Bronson, Julia Couzens, Terri Friedman, Don Giffin, Dennis Hollingsworth, Carlos Mollura, Carter Potter, Monique Prieto, and Chris Wilder.) In reviewing that exhibition for The Times, Cathy Curtis wrote: Don Giffin reinvents stain painting by layering color in such a way that it emits an inner radiance verging on iridescence. The artist continued to push boundaries, and when he displayed his 6 X 5-foot acrylics at the Grimes Gallery in 2000, Pagel described them as mesmerizing works.
The cross-fertilization between painting and photography that has been cropping up in some of the most intriguing works being made today takes breathless shape in Don Giffin’s physically resplendent paintings,” the critic wrote.
“When I work,” he once said, “it’s like I’m doing a dance with the painting, and I’m not always leading. When the imagery is mysterious, the surface is perfectly smooth and the color contrast is just right with that glow of pale color coming through it’s sheer delight.
Finish Fetish denotes a style of art related to the LA Look, pop art, minimalism, and light and space originating in southern California in the 1960s. Artwork of this type often has a glossy and slick finish and features an abstract design on a two-or three-dimensional surface made from fiberglass or resins. The style is similar to the simplicity and abstraction of minimalism and the bright colors and reference to commercial products found in pop art. To the world of postwar art it was a substantive addition. Artists included Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Judy Chicago, Joe Goode, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Kenneth Price, DeWain Valentine, Don Dudley.
Works are often reminiscent of automobiles and surfboards. Artists have "used new resins, paints and plastics, and adopted highly innovative fabrication processes from the industrial world to create seamless, bright, and pristine-looking objects directly inspired by California culture. In doing so, they often blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, 2D and 3D, handcrafted and industrially-produced objects."
He was also associated with the Light and Space movement, a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s and influenced by John McLaughlin. It is characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomena, such as light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic, often forming installations conditioned by the work's surroundings. Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Eric Orr, Keith Sonnier and James Turrell. See less