Her paintings are like a time machine, taking us back to the Golden State’s golden years. In a new exhibit at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, New York artist Amy Park transforms the late architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s black-and-white photos of Modernist California homes and buildings into cheery tributes to an era long gone.
The show, “California Experimental Architecture,” captures architecture designed during an idyllic time in the state’s history, which Artinfo’s Kelly Chan writes is a sentiment that is “unattainable, now more than ever.” It was a period, she says, full of optimism that inspired and enabled.
Shulman’s iconic images of buildings by Charles Eames, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pierre Koenig empowered an entire local design movement. His compositions awakened the masses to the ideas, hopes, and visions behind the façades of his subjects. It was Shulman who pioneered architectural photography as its own distinctive art form.
Tributes to the photographer, best remembered for his photos of L.A., already exist on film and in print.