Terry Haggerty
TERRY HAGGERTY | PALM BEACH DAILY NEWS
9 October 2014
West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Museum of Art, September 23, 2014 – June 23, 2015. Lobby installation view of Untitled, 2014.
Image courtesy of artist.
Haggerty chose fluorescent red “mostly because it’s a volumetric color,” he said.“I wanted something that could hold while traversing these pitched angles.”
He uses a stencil in a meticulous process that involves applying five coats of paint to achieve a slick finish that looks machine-made but is anything but.A team of six, including the artist, worked for more than a week to install the piece.
“The idea is that with a simple language you can create confounding experiences that are physical because of the scale of this space,” he said.“You can get lost in these illusions. For me, that’s quite interesting.”
- Jan Sjostrom
It’s easy to get lost in Terry Haggerty’s installation at the Norton Museum.
Yes, you know you’re in the lobby. There’s the soaring, 8-sided cupola topped with an oculus just inside the entrance and the doors leading to the galleries. But the familiar space has been wrapped with red and white candy-stripe ribbons that distort it as effectively as a house of mirrors.
The British-born, Berlin-based artist is the latest to create a year-long installation for the lobby, following Jose Alvarez, Rob Wynne and Mickalene Thomas. He’s also the first to engage nearly the entire room, as opposed to concentrating on the north wall.
“He really pushed it and made something unlike anything that’s been done here before,” said Cheryl Brutvan, director of curatorial affairs and curator of contemporary art.“The architecture laid down the gauntlet and he picked it up.”
West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Museum of Art, September 23, 2014 – June 23, 2015. Installation view of Untitled, 2014.
Image courtesy of artist.
Haggerty’s art descends from hard-edged abstraction, minimalism and op art. He works exclusively with line, creating illusionistic spaces with a single color and parallel lines that defy the actual dimensions of the surfaces on which they’re created. In addition to museums and galleries, his art adorns the AT&T Stadium in Dallas and the London office of the global reinsurance company Munich Re.
At the Norton, the ribbons slice diagonally across white walls and dive into hairpin curves. Wide bands compress into narrower passages, speeding up and slowing the gaze.At some points, the lines seem to bulge out of flat walls; at others they plunge into a nonexistent distance beyond the surface.
Haggerty has been fascinated by painting’s ability to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space since childhood. He made his first wall drawing in 2001, when he created an illusionistic framework around an air vent in a New York gallery.
“That opened up the possibility of interacting with space,” he said. “It became about this interaction between the perceived illusion and the architecture. It’s just lines, but at the same time it makes volume.”
When he viewed the Norton lobby he knew he couldn’t limit himself to a single wall. He was fascinated by the room’s many angles and its multiple points of entry.With shifts of vantage point, the illusion changes.