Charles Arnoldi

Charles Arthur Arnoldi (born 10 April 1946) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker whose work has moved, over more than five decades, between the flatness of painting and the physical presence of sculpture.

Early life and training

Arnoldi was born in Dayton, Ohio, on 10 April 1946. He moved to California at the age of eighteen and briefly attended art schools there, including the Chouinard Art Institute, before leaving formal study to work independently. Settling in Los Angeles, he became part of the generation of Southern Californian artists who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s and who worked outside the New York mainstream, favouring industrial and vernacular materials over traditional studio media.

Sticks, plywood and the 1970s

Arnoldi's early reputation rested on constructions built from tree branches. He lashed, glued and pinned sticks into open lattices and dense thickets that read simultaneously as drawing in space and as relief sculpture, hovering between the natural material they were made from and the rigorously abstract compositions they produced. In 1977 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In the same year he had his first stick sculpture cast in bronze, a translation that fixed the fragility of the branch in a permanent and traditional sculptural material. Alongside the sticks he worked with plywood, cutting into laminated panels and filling the gouges with colour so that the support itself became the drawn mark.

The turn to painting

In the 1990s Arnoldi's output changed radically. He began producing abstract paintings on canvas, working first in black and white and later in bright, saturated colour. These paintings retain the vocabulary of the earlier constructions, with overlapping planes, interlocking shapes and an insistent sense of edge, but resolve it into a flat pictorial field. Hard edged geometric forms are set against fluid, lyrical lines, and the tension between the two has remained a central subject of his work. His practice has been characterised as a form of post minimal abstraction, in which the physicality of sculpture is merged with the surface logic of painting.

Exhibitions

Arnoldi has exhibited steadily since the early 1970s. Solo and group presentations include an exhibition at the California State University at Fullerton Art Gallery in 1972, a survey of unique prints at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1984, a survey of the years 1971 to 1986 at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1986, a presentation of painting and sculpture from 1971 to 1988 at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco in 1988, an exhibition at Gallery Kuranuki in Osaka in 1991, and a survey organised by Fred Hoffman Fine Art in Los Angeles in 1996. In 2002 the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum in South Korea presented Harmony of Line and Color, and in 2008 the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu mounted Charles Arnoldi: Wood. He has continued to show with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles, where an exhibition was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times in December 2011.

Collections and legacy

Arnoldi's work is held in major American public collections. As of 2024 these included the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds two paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His studio also lists holdings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. A monograph covering the years 1972 to 2008 was published by Radius Books in Santa Fe in 2008, and earlier catalogues accompanied his museum surveys in Chicago, San Francisco, Busan and Malibu.