Who+makes+Op+Art


 * Who makes Op Art**

**Richard Paul Lohse (1902 - 1988)** Richard Lohse was a Swiss printmaker and painter who experimented with several styles and subjects before adopting Concrete art in the 1940’s. He then began producing paintings that were mathematically produced patterns, normally of grids. Despite its rigid process, his work has been praised for its beauty and sophisticated color. Lohse also gained an international reputation after 1950.

**Heinz Mack (1931 - )** Heinz Mack was born in Lollar in Hesse on March 8, 1931. He studied painting and philosophy. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene are responsible for founding the avant-garde artist group called ZERO. Light and movement were a big focus in his art creations. In 1966, he had a show at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York which was also the same year as ZERO’s last exhibition. In the early 1970’s ZERO dissolved and another independent work group was formed. During the 1980’s, Mack was asked to design a lot of public spaces. He did Jurgen-Ponto-Platz, the Columne pro caelo and the Platz der Deutschen Einhet. Mack resumed painting in 1991 and created his own set of works. Heinz Mack is known as an experimenter with colored light. Whether he was painting, drawing sculpting or designing he always used light and color in new ways. His works are located all over the world.

**Victor Vasarely (1908 - 1997)** Vasarely was born in Pécs. Vasarely lived in Budapest in 1925 where he took up medical studies at Budapest University. In 1927 he abandoned medicine to learn traditional academic painting at the private Podolini-Volkmann Academy. In 1928-1929, he enrolled at Sándor Bortnyik's műhely lit. "workshop", in existence until 1938, then widely recognized as the center of Bauhaus studies in Budapest. Cash-strapped, the műhely could not offer all that the Bauhaus offered. Instead it concentrated on applied graphic art and typographical design. In 1929 he painted his Blue Study and Green Study. In 1930 he married his fellow student Claire Spinner. Together they had two sons, Andre and Jean-Pierre. In Budapest, he worked for a ball-bearings company in accounting and designing advertising posters. Victor Vasarely became a graphics designer and a poster artist during the 1930’s who combined patterns and organic images with each other.

**Bridget Riley (1931- )** Bridget Riley in 1931 is a well-known British artist celebrated since the mid-1960s for her distinctive, optically vibrant paintings, called “Op Art.” She explores optical phenomena and juxtaposes color either by using a chromatic technique of identifiable hues or by selecting achromatic colors like black, white or gray. In doing so, her work appears to flicker, pulsate and move, encouraging the viewer’s visual tension. Riley’s vibrant optical pattern paintings, which she painted in the 1960s, were hugely popular and become a hallmark of the period. Riley spent two years copying Seurat’s painting, Bridge of Courbevoie, to learn about his painting technique and his use of complementary colors. She describes the process as "being a revelation to her" with regard to color. Soon after, in 1966, Riley begins to use color to achieve new optical effects. By juxtaposing lines of complementary pure colors she can affect the perceived brightness of the individual colors.