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The Marriage of Art and Architecture in the Hyatt Center
Two years before completion of the Hyatt Center, its developers, Pritzker Realty Group and Higgins Development Partners, and its architect, Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, set out to incorporate in the landmark building, works of art that would be meaningful, innovative and aesthetically pleasing. It was then that they retained Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services to assist them with the process and the choices.
The process began with a comprehensive review of the history of public art and the various ways art could be integrated in a major city building. After due consideration, the team disavowed the conventional approach of first completing the building and then either choosing works by any artist or by choosing existing works by certain selected artists. Instead, they wanted to commission two different artists whose specific works would open a dialogue with the architecture, be appropriate to the building's scale and grandeur, and provide a rich visual experience for tenants and the public for years to come.
More than thirty widely recognized artists were identified and contacted by for the two commissions. Over time and many meetings, the list was gradually narrowed. Finally, on the basis of their understanding and sensitivity to the architecture, and the engaging and beautifully enhancing works they each proposed, Keith Tyson and Ricci Albenda, were selected for the Hyatt Center.
...about Keith Tyson
| The winner of Britain's prestigious Turner prize in 2002, Keith Tyson incorporates systems of logic, scientific methodology and chance into his work. Tyson's art reflects a quest for comprehension, while evaluating the limits and infinites of his environment. His expression of both hypotheses and conclusion is conceptually founded and expressed in painting, drawing and sculpture. |
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Tyson's work has been exhibited at a number of venues worldwide, notably the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kleines Helmhaus, Zurich, the Kunsthalle, Zurich, the Venice Biennale, Italy, and the Tate Modern, London. He is represented by Pace Wildenstein in New York, Haunch of Venison in London, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, and Arndt & Partner in Berlin.
Tyson will be the subject of his first major solo show in America beginning October 15, 2005 when PaceWildenstein in New York presents Geno-Pheno. In these new paintings and sculptures Tyson explores, through extremely unconventional means, the nature and paradox of causality.
Tyson was born in Ulverston, Cumbria, England in 1969 and as a young man he worked as an apprentice engineer in a shipyard that made nuclear submarines. Deciding to pursue art, he quit the shipyards and gained admission to the Carlisle College of Art, England, graduating in 1990. He earned his M.A. in Alternative Practice at the University of Brighton, England in 1993.
about Keith Tyson's art for the Hyatt Center
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Keith Tyson's two panel paintings, each forty feet high and ten feet wide, enliven the reception halls located at opposite ends of the tower. These exuberant, hand-painted works provide the viewer with the artist's look at the building's molecular structure from two different perspectives - each having been accurately modeled in three dimensions on high-powered computers in Tyson's London studios. Tyson's work addresses scale and complexity, from the universal to the microscopic. In conceiving these works he was mindful of "The Powers of Ten," a 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames, which was made near the Hyatt Center site. |
Keith Tyson recent winner of the prestigious Turner Prize was born in 1969 in England. Since 1990 Tyson has exhibited at galleries and museums in New York, London, Paris and Greece and is represented in London by Haunch of Venison Gallery and Pace Wildenstein in New York.
about Ricci Albenda
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Ricci Albenda's text-based paintings and architectural installations have been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, Stedelijk Museum, Belgium, Van Laere, Antwerp, The Barbican Gallery, London, and Massimo de Carlo in Milan. |
For his most recent solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Cyclidrome, Albenda created a series of six paintings using his own functional alphabetical colorization system, yielding a room full of colored word paintings (in his own font) that circulate around the color wheel as well as the alphabet.
Albenda also has an interest in the perception of space and architecture. This interest manifests itself in Albenda's Portal to Another Dimension series, which appear to erupt from and distort the white walls of the gallery as if they were natural phenomena.
Additionally, Albenda creates trompe l'oeil wall paintings that use a Euclidean logic to create the illusion of space on a two dimensional surface. Born in Brooklyn in 1966, Albenda continues to live and work there. He earned his B.F.A from the Rhode Island College of Art and Design in 1988.
...about Ricci Albenda's art for the Hyatt Center
| Ricci Albenda's work embraces the building's architecture, though in a very different way and to different effect from the art of Keith Tyson. He has addressed the architecturally complex lobby where escalators lead to a fitness center and food court for the building's tenants. It is an area past the elevator banks and the main lobby that faces Monroe Street. Here, he has covered almost every surface with a trompe l'oiel mural that integrates the whole in an arresting way. In this work, Albenda does not adamantly adhere to the rules of perspective, but rather creates a space where the viewer can have a unique phenomenological encounter with space and time. |
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