Fred Eversley, who merged art and science to create fascinating parabolic sculptures, died on March 14 at the age of 83. A spokesperson for David Kordansky Gallery, who has represented the artist since 2018, said Hyperallergic That he died unexpectedly after a short illness.
Eversley came out in the late sixties on the art scene of South California, in addition to artists such as Larry Bell, Dewain Valentine and Peter Alexander, whose luminous sculptures made of industrial materials, the unique qualities of West Coast Light conquered. Although he is associated with the light and space movement, the title under which these artists became known, which distinguished Eversley from his colleagues, his compelling interest in the scientific basis behind his artworks, rather than any form of spiritual or transcendent substantiation.
Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Eversley showed an early interest in science, using a turntable and cake plate filled with Jell-O to create parabolic forms. He studied electrical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), where he was the only Black Engineering -student. He moved to Los Angeles in 1963, where he worked as an engineer for WYLE Laboratories that designs acoustic laboratories for NASA. Frustrated by racist housing policy, he settled in Venice Beach, one of the few integrated neighborhoods on the west side of the city. He spent a large part of his career in Venice, and before he became an artist, he would help neighbors such as Judy Chicago and Larry Bell with their technical problems.
After a debilitating car accident in 1967, he left Engineering and started experimenting with resin in the studio of artist Charles Mattox, who created his first sculptures, transparent cylinders of colored resin cut on different corners. In 1969 he moved to the studio of the deceased painter John Altoon designed by Frank Gehry, and the following year he threw out his first full parabolic lens in Polyesterhars, a form that he would continue to explore for more than five decades.
“His life ran parallel to the art world and suddenly it really crossed the moment and the place where artists became more interested in the questions in which he was interested as an engineer,” Whitney Museum of American Art Curator Kim Conaty said in an interview in 2019.
On the suggestion of Robert Rauschenberg, he contacted the dealers of New York Betty Parsons and Leo Castelli, who both refused to offer him shows, although Parsons bought some works. A casual encounter with curator Marcia Tucker led to a solo show in the Whitney Museum in 1970, followed by exhibitions in OK Harris Gallery in New York and Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago.
Eversley was not overlooked; His work is in the collections of more than 40 museums. However, the level of fame that some of his contemporaries reached turned out to be elusive. The deep scientific basis of his works distinguished him from other Light & Space artists, all of whom were also white, and his hard abstractions do not fit comfortably within the limits of black art movement of the 1960s and 70s.
That began to change in the past decade. In 2018, David Kordansky became the first and only gallery that represented him. In 2022, the Orange County Museum of Art opened a new building with a concise retrospectivewho expanded during his 1976 solo show in the same institution. He created his First outdoor cast resin sculpture In 2023, a Commission for the Public Art Fund, a towering Magenta Parabolic Monument in Central Park entitled ‘Parabolic Light’. “Portals,” his largest public artworks, consisting of eight monumental steel cylinders, was unveiled in West Palm Beach at the end of last year.
Despite their technical and scientific basis, Eversley’s sculptures are all about changing perception, and the relationship between the viewer, the artwork and the world as it is reflected and broken, themes that he is never tired of exploring countless variations.
“The virtuosity of Eversley is matched by a modest humor,” wrote Hyperallergic Reviews Natalie Haddad in 2021. “The correspondence between the parabolic lens and the eye can evoke associations with surveillance or panopticism, underlined by laying our own reflections with the distorted views and reflections of others.”
Eversley was forced to leave his studio in Venice in 2019 when his landlord refused to renew his lease and to move full -time to his Soho studio in New York, which he had occupied since the end of the 1970s.
“He had a clear clarity of vision that was unique and never staggered,” said curator Cassandra Coblentz, who came up with the OCMA show 2022, said Hyperallergic. “He approached his work with enormous integrity and for decades, he remained persistent in his dedication to improve his profession. I was always struck by the joy he took to explore the most subtle nuance that would push his vision forward.”
