Conferring Blue

Julian Stanczak became a leading pioneer of Op Art, despite having lost the use of his right arm in a soviet concentration camp as a child. Op Art arose as a global movement in the early 1960s, influenced by the Bauhaus, a school founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. The school integrated the fine arts, design, and architecture into a single curriculum. Like Bauhaus artists, Stanczak was interested in the interplay between function and form. The luminous, pulsating effects of Op Art, or optical art, are created through hard-edged patterns of contrasting colors that create optical illusions in the mind. To Stanczak, Op Art is “nothing but the scrutiny of how we go about seeing – how much is sight, how much is mental interpretation.”