painting theater
by
Douglas Messerli
Gronk
“Theater of Paint” / Los Angeles,
Craft & Folk Art Museum, Howard Fox, Pablo Capra, and I attended the show
on Sunday, July 3, 2016
Just
a few weeks ago I mentioned to my husband Howard that I had not seen new work
by the Los Angeles artist Gronk for some time now. In fact, it turns out that
he has not had a solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles for more than two
decades. Now, fortunately, the Craft & Folk Art Museum reveals to us what
Gronk has been up to in a stunning new exhibition, “Theater of Paint.”
Certainly there are a few older
paintings and photographs in this show, including two versions of his famed
female image La Tormenta, a strong
woman figure facing away from the viewer, her back to us, forcing us to stare
into the same distant space in which she is looking. And there are a few older
documentary works from his early days working with the ASCO group. But even
these exceptions merely reveal that Gronk has been interested in performance
and theater since his earliest days. Along with Patssi Valdez, Willie F. Herrón
III, and Harrry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk staged several street theater pieces,
improvising narratives that interacted with the real space. And in 1997 La
Tormenta was herself the subject of a concert piece, written by Froykan Cabuto
with music by Otto Cifuentes performed while Gronk painted, in time with the
music, yet a another image of his iconic figure; so here too Gronk reveals, as
he explained to Howard, our friend Pablo Capra, and me in a personal tour of
the show, that he has long focused on painting in a theatrical context.
Beginning in 1989, moreover, the artist
turned his attention directly on creating large canvases with wooden and
cardboard accessories for plays and operas. That year he painted the single
“backdrop” for Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s Stone
Wedding for the Latino Theatre Lab of Los Angeles Theatre Center. The work,
so he told us, had been stored at that theater for all these years, and was
rediscovered when director of the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Suzanne Isken
called the Center.
In 1990, Gronk did sets for four more
plays, including Culture Clash’s The
Mission and a production by the East West Players for Come Back, Little Sheba.
The
following years, he added several other new plays to his resume, including
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, a character
who, once more, closely relates to La Tormenta, and a play by the noted
Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Losa, performed at Los Angeles’ Chapel Court
Theater, which won the Drama-Logue Award for set design. Numerous other plays
followed before, in 1998, he began working with the noted director Peter
Sellars, first for an adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Screens by Gloria Alvarez, Peter Galindo, Lynn Jeffries at
Cornerstone Theater Company, for another collaboration between Gloria Alvarez
and Sellars of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Historie
du soldat. Ainadamar, with a
libretto by David Henry Hwang and music by Osvaldo Golijov, which Sellars
directed for The Santa Fe Opera and was later performed at Lincoln Center in
New York; a Production of Henry Purcell’s The Indian Queen, this directed by Sellars for The Perm Opera and
Ballet Theatre in Russia, followed.

This new exhibition contains several full
backdrops—which Gronk creates after extensive research into history and
mythology, aiming for an emotional expressivity rather than a specific
setting—along with models and video screenings of the sets. “Theater of Paint”
also includes an entirely new work,
inspired by the book of surrealist-like poems by Chuck Rosenthal and
Gail Wronsky which Gronk illustrated. The set also contains a decorated stage
with cardboard props so that museum-goers can themselves become actors, playing
out events of their own imaginations. Pablo snapped a picture of Howard and me
with Gronk, appearing to my way of thinking, a bit like three monsters holding
a kind of alien baby.
The exhibition will also feature a
performance of Tormenta Omnia on July
16, in both English and Spanish, a poetry reading by Rosenthal and Wronsky on
July 24th, and conversation between Sellars and Gronk on August 6.
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