Budd Hopkins
Budd Hopkins was a mainstay of New York’s Cedar Bar in the 1950s and 60s alongside Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. He was a regular contributor to Artforum from 1975 to 1979 and he authored a rigorous body of criticism dedicated to the status of painting. But in 1976, the artist became something of a cult figure in the investigation of alien abduction when he began publishing on the subject in the Village Voice. He eventually wrote four books on extraterrestrial invasion, and pundits in the field Whitley Strieber and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack credit him with sparking their interest in the phenomenon.
There is a superficial dualism built into Hopkins’s identity and his work alike. His mature paintings arrived in the early 1960s with the combinatory impulses of late-modernism, channeling the abstract expressionist impulses of the era. His canvases from the late 1960’s and 1970’s, are in a southwestern design palette of bold primary colors augmented by muted colors feature hard-edged geometric compositions interrupted by searing passages of gestural abstraction.
Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) gained his BFA from Oberlin College, OH, in 1953. His work is held in the collections of numerous public and private institutions internationally, including: …
Budd Hopkins was a mainstay of New York’s Cedar Bar in the 1950s and 60s alongside Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. He was a regular contributor to Artforum from 1975 to 1979 and he authored a rigorous body of criticism dedicated to the status of painting. But in 1976, the artist became something of a cult figure in the investigation of alien abduction when he began publishing on the subject in the Village Voice. He eventually wrote four books on extraterrestrial invasion, and pundits in the field Whitley Strieber and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack credit him with sparking their interest in the phenomenon.
There is a superficial dualism built into Hopkins’s identity and his work alike. His mature paintings arrived in the early 1960s with the combinatory impulses of late-modernism, channeling the abstract expressionist impulses of the era. His canvases from the late 1960’s and 1970’s, are in a southwestern design palette of bold primary colors augmented by muted colors feature hard-edged geometric compositions interrupted by searing passages of gestural abstraction.
Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) gained his BFA from Oberlin College, OH, in 1953. His work is held in the collections of numerous public and private institutions internationally, including: The British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; De Cordova Museum, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Courtesy of Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd.