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An important exponent of gestural abstraction, Charles Arnoldi is recognized as one of the most important artists to have emerged from Southern California during the 1970s.
Arnoldi was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1946. He moved to California in 1964, completing his general education at Ventura Junior College in 1968. In that same year, he began his formal training at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Early in 1969, while he was still in school, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art awarded Arnoldi its celebrated Young Talent Purchase Award, which proved instrumental in establishing his reputation on the West Coast.
Arnoldi subsequently terminated his studies at the Chouinard Institute and began working independently. His earliest work consisted of a series of stick or twig paintings. Eliminating the conventional canvas support, Arnoldi dipped tree branches in paint and then attached them to brightly painted plywood panels with jagged holes cut in them. By combining natural materials with a painterly, gestural approach, Arnoldi aligned himself with the prevailing Post-Minimalist aesthetic. He quickly achieved national and international recognition, participating in such important group shows as The Power Survey of Contemporary Art, organized by the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia (1969), Permutations: Light and Color, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1970), and Dokumenta 5 in Kassel, Germany (1972).
In 1971, Arnoldi had his first solo exhibition at the Riko Mizuno Gallery in Los Angeles. Since that time, he has had numerous one-man shows in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Houston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Arnoldi has also received additional awards and prizes, including two National Endowment for the Arts Artists Fellowships (1974, 1982) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975).
In recent years, Arnoldi has replaced the soft lyricism of his stick paintings with a more dramatic, expressionistic approach. He also began producing woodcuts, printed from blocks that were either collaged with sticks and branches and then sanded to receive ink, or incised with a chain-saw. In his recent monotypes, he has continued to explore natural materials as well as more complex arrangements of color and texture.
Charles Arnoldi currently divides his time between Los Angeles and New York. Examples of his work can be found in many public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, to name only a few.
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