Painting the IMA
Adrian Schiess has referred to his panel artworks as “brushstrokes”—each is independently unique but is also installed as part of a larger picture. The exhibition Off the Wall: Adrian Schiess is comprised of ten panel pieces and two video projections arranged by the artist in six locations around the IMA campus. It is in the act of situating the panels and videos that Schiess identifies a gesture of “painting”—a creative act produced in direct dialogue with the museum environment, producing encounters between the artworks, the architecture, and the visitors.
Adrian Schiess has one rule for his panels: they are never hung on a wall. This exhibition demonstrates a variety of presentation formats: the works can be seen stacked on top of each other in one broad, large-scale installation in the Contemporary galleries, while one appears in a solitary, subtle arrangement peeking behind a table on display in the historic Lilly House. In this exhibition, Adrian Schiess has responded in particular to occasions where natural light affects the works, made primarily of aluminum covered with glossy lacquer, so that their reflective surfaces may change over time. Fluctuations in the environment around the panels makes them, in his words, “paintings in progress.”
At the top of the escalators in the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion, two works by Adrian Schiess are on view. Painting (2006/2007), made specifically for this exhibition and on view for the first time at IMA, is an abstract work taken from a photograph of a painting by Schiess. This work sits on the floor in a previously vacant area on the balcony, and animates the space with color and reflections of the exterior windows that rebound in a dark tinted glass interior window. Also on view in this area is Painting (2005), a green panel treated with iridescent lacquer that glows orange in direct light. This work is propped against the wall to specifically reflect the light-drenched span of windows surrounding the main entrance. Schiess has talked about this work “bringing the outside inside.” Changes in daylight, foliage and seasonal weather will alter the appearance of color over the course of the exhibition.
For the European Galleries, Schiess selected a lacquer covered panel that modulates between hues of deep purple, violet, and white. In this, his first ever installation in a historical painting gallery, Schiess placed his artwork, Painting (2003-2005), to literally reflect the works that surround it. Raoul Dufy’s The Studio (c. 1942), for example, presents an interior scene of paintings before a window, one still in process on an easel. This image has a relationship with Adrian Schiess’s use of the gallery as a provisional studio space for producing his unique painting project. The panel on view here is echoed by the profile of Painting (2006/2007), visible on the other side of the tinted window. Viewing these works from the perspective of the gallery bench, Schiess envisioned a “cascading” set of reflections leading into other museum spaces and out to the exterior landscape. A conversation about this work between Adrian Schiess and Ellen Lee, Wood-Pulliam Distinguished Senior Curator, is available on the audio tour that accompanies the exhibition.
Schiess sited two installations in the Contemporary Galleries. In the Off the Wall gallery, his work Painting (2007) rests upright against the title wall, partially obstructing his own name. The image on this work is taken from a photograph of a colorful, gestural painting by Schiess, and its placement makes a nod to the large-scale Abstract Expressionist works on view in the gallery behind it. In Schiess’s words, the work “solves the problem of symmetry” by sitting markedly off-center along this wall, defying expectations for balanced composition; On view in the Anna S. & James P. White Gallery is the largest construction in the exhibition, incorporating four panel pieces in varying media, with one large, pearlescent polyester piece draped over the top of the assemblage. Schiess compares the varying thicknesses of the works to different brushstrokes. Underneath each panel, industrial materials such as foam and wood are visibly used as platforms that enhance the height differences of the upper surfaces. In this arrangement, Schiess orients each of the artworks towards the window in an attempt “touch the outside,” being moved by Indianapolis’s “endless flatness and huge sky.” Painting (2006/2007), also made specifically for the IMA exhibition, is the first work by Adrian Schiess to show a representational photograph on a panel. Here, the artist describes his attempt to “keep an image” of a white rose on the surface of a panel, breaking from his traditional use of the lacquer to only reflect images from the surrounding environments.
The corridor to the DeBoest Lecture Hall on the ground level of the museum hosts seven videos, a medium that Schiess has been using for over two decades. All of the videos are abstract, and many present monochromatic color fields that change hue at varying paces. The artist recalls that in his earliest video installations he had trouble finding museums that owned projectors. Because of the slow pace of the changing color fields, visitors to early exhibitions reported that the video monitors were “broken.”
The two projectors in this installation each host the same sequence of videos. Adrian Schiess chose to begin the two looped reels at different points, creating new and ever shifting moods and color combinations.
One panel, Painting (2007), is on view in the Oldfields-Lilly House & Gardens historic home. The silver and white colors of this work reflect ceramic and silver objects surrounding it in the Lilly House dining room, and its orientation is in direct relation to the furniture on display. However, the unexpected placement if this work, and its industrial materials (lacquer on a thick aluminum sandwich board), make it evidently out of place. Adrian Schiess says of this installation, “It shows exactly that it doesn’t fit. It asks questions about space and place.” A conversation about this work between Adrian Schiess and Bradley Brooks, Director, Lilly House Programs and Operations, is available on the audio tour that accompanies the exhibition.
Adrian Schiess has discussed his exhibition at the IMA as a search for contact and dialogue with visitors, with other artworks in the museum, as well as with the “real world” outside of the museum. Schiess sums up his goals, saying, “One can imagine an endless amount of reflections or images passing across the surface, but it’s open to the past because maybe a visitor remembers seeing it five months earlier. Passing over images on the surface you may have passed those reflected images before. Maybe the weather was different or you were in different company…. On a plate, the surface shows what’s happening now.” In this sense, individual viewers activate the artworks by having unique experiences of this exhibition.
Audio tours with commentary by Adrian Schiess and IMA curators are available FREE every day through 5:00 pm. Pick these up at the Information Desk on the 1st floor, or download these as podcasts online at www.imamuseum.org/connect/podcast.
