Untitled

Craig Kauffman pursued unorthodox materials from early in his career. Initial efforts in glass led him to engage less-fragile industrial plastics, and his first painted wall relief dates to the mid-1960s. Kauffman remains best known for the oblong bubble shape of works like Untitled, returning repeatedly not only to this shape but also to the perceptual effect generated by his painting of it: pearlescent, with a fuzzy, darkened contour, the edges of the relief appear to shimmer as if they might be permeable. Although vacuum-formed and slick, even impersonal, Untitled exudes a kind of sensuousness, as much biological as technological in its associations.