Hap Tivey

Tivey has focused on phenomenological experiences since he first began making art in the late 1960s, pursuing, in his words, ‘’the concrete experience of light as well as the emotional and theoretical implications it holds for the human experience.’’1 Tivey’s ability to create paintings, sculptures and installations that investigate perceptual phenomena is due to his deep technical and spiritual expertise.

Tivey’s technical expertise stemmed from his father, who was a physicist, and his undergraduate and graduate studies at Pomona College. With a scholarship from Lockheed Aircraft, he entered Pomona College in 1965 as a physics major, later changing his major to math and then again to art in his final year prior to graduate school. All three disciplines played major roles in the creation of the light-based art that the artist would spend the next fifty years developing, an art practice that required advanced knowledge of mathematics and spatial relationships. His passions and skills were further nurtured in Southern California by a pivotal relationship with James Turrell. Tivey met Turrell in 1971 at Pomona and together they would co-create several important works together. Tivey also served as a teaching assistant to Turrell at Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University).

The artist’s spiritual awakening began in 1967 when he first began practicing Rinzai Zen.3 In 1974, after creating several groundbreaking ganzfeld installation works in Los Angeles, Tivey sold his truck and bought a one-way ticket to Japan to train as a monk at Hofuku-ji Zen monastery. Zen values of simplicity, tranquility and grace are present in Tivey’s early works and have been a consistent theme in his art, appearing too in the works presented in this exhibition.

Hap Tivey (b.1947, Portland, OR; lives and works in Brooklyn and Freehold, New York) holds a BFA from Pomona College, Claremont, CA and two graduate degrees from Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University), Claremont, CA. He has exhibited in the United States and internationally for over fifty years. Hap Tivey’s work is in the permanent collections of Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Chase Manhattan Collection, New York, NY; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pomona College, Claremont, CA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; University of California at Irvine, CA University of California at Riverside, CA; and University of California at Santa Barbara, CA, among others. Tivey was privately commissioned by the leading collectors of the 20th Century, including Christophe de Menil, Giuseppe Panza, and Claude Picasso.