Craig Kauffman

Craig Kauffman was an American artist whose abstract paintings and acrylic wall reliefs explored light and transparency. Often lozenge or bubbled shaped, Kauffman’s glossy works sometimes took on a sexual quality while remaining abstract. “Shaping the brittle sheet plastic into a series of voluptuous curves, Kauffman achieves a kind of abstract eroticism that is purely visual,” the art historian Barbara Rose wrote of him. Born on March 31, 1932 in Los Angeles, CA, he studied architecture at the University of Southern California before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles to receive a degree in painting instead. Beginning in the early 1960s, Kaufmann began experimenting with painting on glass which eventually led him to paint on acrylic plastic sheets. By this time, he had already begun exhibiting at Ferus Gallery along with Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and Billy Al Bengston. Over the decades that followed, Kaufmann’s works were seen increasingly as more sumptuous antecedent to the austere Minimalism of Donald Judd. The artist died on May 9, 2010 in Angeles City, Philippines. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Credit artnet.com