Avantika Bawa, “Coliseum 01”, Graphite and pastel on paper, 2015.
Avantika Bawa at Portland Art Museum APEX and Portland Art Museum present a new body of work by Portland-based artist Avantika Bawa. August 18, 2018 – February 10, 2019]]>
Source: Portland Art Museum
Looking at a singular Portland architectural structure, Bawa presents her ongoing series of drawings, prints, and large panel paintings of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Bawa combines her long interest in architecture and geometry as a subject in her work with a focus on this modernist building of the International Style. Designed by the architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, the Coliseum was completed in 1960.
Bawa first began working with the architecture of the Coliseum as a subject in 2015 for the 30th anniversary of the Visual Chronicle of Portland, a city-owned collection of works on paper commissioned by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. The APEX exhibition continues Bawa’s fascination with the Coliseum’s grids, lines, colors, and mass. As a result, the study of the Coliseum has continued to be an examination in abstraction and memory of a place through the inquiry of its form.
In “Coliseum 17” (2017) and her print series created at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts this summer, Bawa’s approach brings to mind Ed Ruscha’s dramatic two-point perspective depictions of gas stations in Los Angeles. The singular focus of this gridded structure is also reminiscent of Ruscha’s Parking Lots (1967/1999), where an aerial view of a gridded parking lot turns further into grids among other aerial views of parking lots. Bawa’s intensive look at the exterior of the Coliseum on occasion hints at the sensual bowl curve housed within the steel and glass frame, but most of the works have a frontal perspective, viewing the body in the landscape similar to Lewis Baltz’s “The New Industrial Parks” series (1974), capturing a stark landscape dominated by a building rather than a natural environment.
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