By The Entertainer | Posted: Thursday, April 9, 2009 12:00 am
Corvallis artist puts five decades of his fascination with mythology on display
CORVALLIS - A solo exhibit titled "Gvido Augusts: Five Decades of New and Adapted Mythology" is currently on display in the Concourse Gallery in the Memorial Union at Oregon State University. The exhibit will run through April 30.
Bold colors and dynamic imagery fill the display cases. Using a broad spectrum of media, Gvido Augusts work blends classical and modern, first and developing world and secular and spiritual motifs together. His art confronts and engages the era of intensifying globalization that has coincided almost exactly to the five decades of his professional life. Augusts freely uses elements of various cultures, enabling the past and present to meet in a new territory of myth and imagination. Incorporating global elements, new and old, the artist writes his own history. The world that Augusts conjures in his art is fragmented and complex.
Born in Latvia in 1932, Augusts immigrated to the United States, settling in Northern California in 1950. He studied at San Jose State College and the San Francisco Art Institute; by 1960 he was living and working in Berkeley, Calif., just as the huge social upheavals of that era were beginning. Actively exhibiting in the Bay Area since his first one- man show at the Vorpal Gallery in 1964, throughout the remainder of the decade, further solo exhibitions at galleries, universities, and art museums followed, including in 1968 a commission from the University of California art museum to produce posters for a film retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard's work, including a poster for the U.S. Premiere of Godard's "La Chinoise." In 1968, Augusts established Gvido Press in Los Altos, Calif., which would in the years to come produce hundreds of different prints, portfolios, and illustrated books.
A full-time painter and printmaker, Augusts would spend the coming decades traveling widely across five continents all the while producing a prolific body of work. He has resided in Corvallis since 2004.
The Concourse Gallery has arranged to have Augusts give an artist presentation at 7 p.m., Thursday, April 16, in the Joyce Goudy Leadership Center, in the Memorial Union at Oregon State University.
Information: 737-6371 or osumu.org/art.html.