Yaacov Agam
(1928 - )
Yaacov Agam (born Yaacov Gipstein on May 11, 1928) is an Israeli sculptor and experimental artist best known for his contributions to optical and kinetic art. Born in Rishon LeZion, Palestine to a religious family, Agam trained at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, before moving to Zürich and then to Paris, where he settled. His first solo exhibition was at the Galerie Graven in 1953, and in 1955 he established himself as one of the leading pioneers of kinetic art at the Le Mouvement exhibition at the Galerie Denise René, alongside such artists as Pol Bury, Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely.
Agam's work is usually abstract, with movement, viewer participation and frequent use of light and sound. His best known pieces include "Double Metamorphosis II" (1965), "Visual Music Orchestration" (1989) and fountains at the La Défense district in Paris (1975) and in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv (1986). He is also known for a type of print known as an Agamograph, which uses lenticular printing to present radically different images, depending on the angle from which it is viewed.
In 1996 Agam was awarded the Jan Amos Comenius Medal by UNESCO for the "Agam Method" for visual education of young children.
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Agam's artwork has direct impact on the current art situation because of his rejection of traditional static concepts of painting and sculpture. He pioneers a new art form that stresses change and movement. In addition to painting and sculpture, his creative activity has included theater and architectural projects, film making, writing and typography. All his preoccupations are involved with the concept of time, change and movement. His paintings and four-dimensional art works are conceived on the basis of an inner interplay of various themes and can either be transformed manually or changed in such a way that the images shift and vary as one walks around them and views them from different angles.
Agam is one of the pioneer creators of the kinetic movement in art as well as its most outstanding contemporary representative. Born in 1928, son of an orthodox Rabbi of Rishon Letzion (Israel), Yaacov Agam studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem. Agam deals with such problems as the 4th dimension, simultaneity and counterpoint in the visual, plastic arts, and he has extended his experiments to application in the fields of literature, music and art theory. He has developed theatrical projects where the spectators are encircled in a total environment of simultaneous and multiple scenes.
In 1963, at the Biennial of Sao Paulo, he received the first prize for creative research. Agam's work breaks with the established way of expressing reality in limited and "determined statements." He strives to demonstrate the principle of reality as a continuous "becoming" rather than as a circumscribed statement. He has been deeply influenced by the Judaic concept that reality cannot be represented in a graven image, and that what is seen or observed consists of fragmented images which can never be grasped as a whole, even in very simple situations. This led Agam to pursue a course of research aimed at creating an image that could not be seen completely at any one time. Such an image gives the viewer the understanding that he is receiving a partial revelation behind which lie unseen levels of reality.
Recently Agam expressed these new conceptions in monumental architectural works such as his "Jacob's Ladder," which forms the ceiling at the National Convention House in Jerusalem. His "Double-Metamorphosis II" is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He created a twenty-seven foot high mural for the passenger ship "Shalom". His water fire fountain mixes water, sound and movement. For the Civic Center at Leverkusen in 1970, Agam created a visual space; an environment which embraces the viewer and makes him live within the painting. He no longer looks out of a framed, fixed and static scene, but rather moves within a space-work which changes constantly according to his shifting position and point of observation.
In 1972, Agam created a whole Environmental Salon for the Elysee Palace in Paris, including walls, kinetic ceiling, moving transparent colored doors and a kinetic tapestry on the floor. The Environmental Salon is now on permanent exhibit at the Pompidou Museum in Paris. At the same time, an Agam mural was being completed at the President's Mansion in Jerusalem. In the new district of La Defense in Paris, he created a monumental musical fountain (1975) comprising 66 vertical water jets shooting water up to 14 meters (46').
Agam has delivered lectures about his theories and experimentations at many art schools, conventions and universities. In 1968 he was guest-lecturer at Harvard University, where he conducted a seminar on the theory of visual communication.
In 1980, a major one-man retrospective exhibit, "Beyond the Visible," was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In 1983, Israel issued an Agam stamp, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the independence of the State of Israel.
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