In Los Angeles, the baby boomer generation that arose after World War II coincided with the military-backed efflorescence of the aerospace industry. At the Palm Springs Art Museum, “Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990” takes good account of the general impact the postwar tech boom had on the region’s painters and sculptors. The exhibition assembles 66 works by 34 artists.
The show is part of the Getty-subsidized festival “ PST Art: Art & Science Collide .” Its particle/wave title alludes to the often mystifying duality of subatomic reality, which drove major scientific discovery for three centuries, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein. The subject of advanced technology and its impact on abstraction in Southern California art isn’t new.
But perceptual experience has been a through-line in the region’s contemporary art history, so it’s good to see a festival exhibition focused on Southern California. Few others are. For art, knowledge is embedded in experience — for example, in the discernment of rhythmic patterns and spatial sensation in the undulations of blue, violet, green and neutral tones in Oskar Fischinger’s beautiful “Multi wave” oil painting from 1948.
White edges turn the pulsing shapes into suggestions of natural phenomena — blossoming flower petals and breaking ocean waves — but neither one is realistically described. The German-American artist, who worked at Paramount Studios after fleeing Adolf.
