Marian Zazeela

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Marian Zazeela (born April 15, 1940 in the Bronx , New York ) is an American painter , light , performance and installation artist , designer and musician .

life and work

Marian Zazeela was born to Russian - Jewish parents in the Bronx. She received her education at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and at Bennington College, where she studied with Paul Feeley , Eugene C. Goossen and Tony Smith . She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with a major in painting in 1960.

Shortly after graduating, she worked on sets for Amiri Barakas (LeRoi Jones) The System of Dante's Hell in New York and worked as an actress and model for Jack Smith (in his film Flaming Creatures and for the photo book The Beautiful Book ). In 1962 she met the composer La Monte Young , with whom she has lived and worked ever since.

In the early 1960s she was a singer in La Monte Young's music group Theater of Eternal Music (which also, at various times, included photographer Billy Name , minimalist musician Terry Riley , musician John Cale , the video artist and musician Tony Conrad as well as poet and musician Angus MacLise ). She also designed the light shows for the group.

Her artistic works from her early - more Expressionist - period are calligraphic paintings and drawings, which then gave way to a psychedelic aspect and later developed in the direction of Op Art .

In 1965 she began her work complex Ornamental Lightyears Tracery and her light and sound installations. She had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art , the Albright-Knox Art Gallery , the Maeght Foundation, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm , the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Haus der Kunst Munich and the Dia Art Foundation as well as numerous other galleries and Venues.

In the next 30 years she designed her work more and more in the direction of environment and sculptural forms, often using colored light and colored shadows, for example in Dusk Adaptation Environment (installation), Still Light (sculpture), Magenta Day / Magenta Night (Installation / sculpture) and in general: Light .

In the late 1960s, Zazeela began her light work in close collaboration with Young's minimalist music as installations and performance Dream Houses . In 1972 she performed a Dream House performance and installation at Documenta 5 in Kassel (together with La Monte Young) in the department Individual Mythologies : Self-Presentation - Performances - Activities - Changes from July 30th to 7th from July 15th : 00 a.m. to 6 p.m. One of the Dream House works has been running at 275 Church Street in New York since the early 1990s and is open to the public three days a week.

In 1970 Zazeela began studying Hindu classical music with Pandit Pran Nath . She performs as a musician and has published writings. In 2000 a monograph on her drawings was published in Germany.

literature

  • Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today ; Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972.
  • documenta archive (ed.); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972 ; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Zazeela, Marian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter, light, performance and installation artist, designer and musician
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH New York , USA