CHARLES ARNOLDI

2018-2024

Artist Reception: September 26th, 6-8 PM

September 26th - October 26th, 2024

While attending Chouinard Art Institute in the 1960s, Chuck Arnoldi was taught that painting and sculpture were dead. Chuck felt like he was being groomed for a career in advertising on Madison Avenue as an illustrator, a future he had no interest in pursuing.

“Maybe I was naive,” he recalls, “but I wanted to figure out how to make paintings without making paintings.”

In 1969, he was recognized by LACMA with their “Young Talent Award” for a series of plexiglass paintings which sidestepped traditional artmaking, but Chuck felt it simply the first step in his evolution. When Pace Gallery came knocking on his door unsolicited looking to exhibit those same plexiglass works, the artist was already on to his next series.

Looking back, Chuck cites a phone call from his buddy at Chouinard as perhaps the most transformative moment in his early days. The guy lived in Malibu where a fire off PC1 was devastating the landscape. His friend suggested they drive up there to steal a bunch of avocados and oranges from a local orchard while authorities were busy battling the blaze, besides, the harvest might burn up before they ever got picked. “Being the dumb kid I was, I agreed to go with him,” Chuck admits. “We are there stealing fruit when I notice some eucalyptus trees whose branches had been charred and they looked like hand-drawn charcoal drawings against the sky. ‘Well, that’s interesting’ I thought.”

Along with his stolen bounty, Chuck broke off some parts of the tree and hauled it all back to his studio. From that encounter his stick paintings were born, which he later showed at Documenta 5 in 1972 alongside Duane Hanson, Claes Oldenburg and Paul Thek.

At 78 years old today, Chuck Arnoldi has explored themes around wood and organics ever since to an almost maniacal degree from cast potato sculptures to chainsaw drawings or replicating the sensation of a stick with a painted line.

Marcel Duchamp said that we must fight against our own good taste if we hope to discover anything new. Chuck Arnoldi shares this sentiment in regards to the narrowness of a signature style. His work is in the permanent collections of the MCA Chicago, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA and The Met in New York and The National Gallery in Washington, D.C.