Jim Isermann
"Vega"
6 June 1999 - 30 April 2000

MAGASIN - Centre National d’Art Contemporain has invited Jim Isermann to create a new piece for “The Street,” the 1,000 square-metre space with a ceiling height of 21 metres in the centre of the art centre.

Isermann’s exhibition-cum-intervention is based on six modular geometric motifs which are given six unvarying colours.
The motifs are printed on an adhesive-backed material and used to cover the entire wall area of the space, forming two opposing geometrical patterns: a repetitive series of rectangles and squares which recurs 15 times, and a set of colour variations which is repeated four times.

Jim Isermann was born in 1955 and studied at the California Institute of the Arts – Cal Arts, Valencia (1980). He now lives and works in Santa Monica.
From the outset, his work used the colours and geometrical forms and motifs he found in the American visual culture of the late sixties and early seventies.
Isermann’s work highlights the influence of modernist art on popular taste in decoration and design and, in turn, of that taste on art itself. This two-way movement is illustrated in one of his recent works, Cubeweave, in which miminalist cubes redolent of Robert Morris or Tony Smith are covered with a handmade woollen blanket with geometric motifs one could easily expect to find in the Designer’s Guild catalogue.