Math bass artist biography
Math Bass
Math Bass was born in 1981 in New York City, New York. She earned a B.A. from Hampshire College, Amherst, in 2003, and a M.F.A. from the University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, in 2011.
An interdisciplinary artist, Bass has worked with installations, performances, paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Although her paintings seem superficially simple with their crisp, geometric shapes and flat colors, they provoke in the viewer a feeling of mysticism. The extreme stylization and graphic character recall signage, but the formal compositions and the incorporation of everyday objects like cigarettes or smoking matches lend the works a strange, surreal quality.
Bass’s sculptures and interventions are sometimes included in her performances, which investigate the relationships between the viewer, the object, and the space around them, including the architecture. Her performances also often include elements of poetry, music, and at times, segments of improvised actions. The integration of these varied elements break down the traditional boundaries of painting and performance.
Bass’s work can be found in several important public and private collections, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai.
New York, United States, 1981
Math Bass's artistic practice encompasses painting, performance, sculpture, and video, constantly exploring the boundaries of contemporary art. One of the distinctive features of their work is the repetition of forms and symbols that, far from being codified into a single meaning, reveal difference at the heart of each iteration. This repetition, along with the fullness and lightness of geometric shapes, creates a visual experience in which the forms become abstract and acquire multiple points of view and reinterpretations.
Recently, Bass has explored new painting techniques, transitioning from gouache on canvas to oil and linen. This shift has allowed for greater expressiveness in their work, as well as a deeper exploration of the relationship between material and meaning. Bass's new paintings are more pictorial and dreamlike, inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in a world of symbols and forms in constant evolution.
In addition to their pictorial work, Bass also engages in performance, sound, video, and sculptural works. Through all these forms of expression, Bass challenges conventional notions of art and its interpretation, involving the viewer in a constant process of decipherment. Ultimately, Math Bass's work invites reflection on the nature of perception and meaning in contemporary art.
Over the past decade, artist Math Bass has developed a lexicon of symbols in the series Newz!—letters, bodily forms, architectural fragments, animals, bones—arranged in a variety of scores, each symbol an empty space of meaning, filled in by the context in which it finds itself. Repetition of these symbols, rather than codifying them into one solid signification, exposes the difference at the heart of each iteration; there is always a gap in meaning, something unnamable left out of and left over in the viewer’s reading—a jouissance. It is this gap in the symbolic where Lee Edelman states queerness lies—not as an easily categorized liberal identity but as a process of unmaking and undoing that leaves (gendered) subjectivity as we know it in question. That these symbols are familiar only heightens our unsettling; the negative space of these compositions, a major player in Bass’s practice, adds further to the gap.
In contrast to older works of gouache on canvas, Bass’s new paintings of oil and linen are more painterly. Whereas quick-drying gouache necessitates a pre-conceived plan, oil allows for the working over of the same material, leaving more of a trace of the artist’s touch; the result is a dreamier depiction of the same symbols, a system in which signs leave even more excess. Visually, it is as though Bass has subjected their own practice to a cybernetic process of learning, and the symbols—having been repeated enough—have begun to form themselves upon the linen, unsure of where they end, fusing together artist and work. In this way, movement and becoming are written into the paintings.
This becoming ties the paintings to Bass’s performance, sound, video, and sculptural works, which track movement through space through kinetic intervention. In all media of their practice, there is an ambivalence that defies easy reading. What does this symbol or this motion signify here? What
Math Bass
American artist
Math Bass (b. 1981, New York, New York) is an artist known for fusing performance with paintings and sculptures using formal elements like solid colors, geometric imagery, raw materials, and visual symbols. Bass has exhibited at Overduin & Kite, Human Resources, and Vielmetter Los Angeles. The artist was featured in the 2012 Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum and in May 2015, MoMA PS1 presented Bass's first solo museum show, Math Bass: Off the Clock, organized by Mia Locks. Bass currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Early life and education
Bass received a BA from Hampshire College in 2003 and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2011.
Work
Bass's practice explores both representation and abstraction and recurring themes include anthropomorphic structures, architectural elements, and altered signage.
At Overduin & Co in 2014, the artist turned the gallery space into a geometric, visual playground. On the last day of the show, the artist along with fellow artists Eden Batki, Lauren Davis Fisher, and Lee Relvas staged a call-and-response recitation.
In 2018, Bass debuted a solo, site-specific mural for the Hammer Museum's lobby wall. The mural depicted several stylized forms such as bones-as- speech-bubbles as well as teeth that looked like a set of stairs leading into a crocodile’s mouth.
Bass ventured into oil painting and figuration for their 2021 solo exhibition at Vielmetter titled, Desert Veins. Paintings in the exhibition included a snake curled around a nest of eggs, a camel skeleton, a brick wall, and a grave marker.
Selected exhibitions
References
- ^"Artst: Math Bass". MutualArt.com. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021. Retrieved 7 July 2021.
- ^Ebner, Shannon (21 July 2014). "Math
- Over the past decade, artist