Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Jordan Belson: The Cosmic View, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes over thirty paintings and drawings made between 1952 and 1970.

Jordan Belson (1926–2011) was a seminal figure in twentieth-century avant-garde cinema renowned for his experimental films, in which he explored a profound consciousness and engagement with the observable world through esoteric mystical abstractions. Belson began his career as a painter, exhibiting his work at SFMOMA and the Guggenheim Museum in the late 1940s, and although he continued to make paintings and drawings for the remainder of his life, after 1950 he focused on filmmaking and never exhibited this part of his work again during his lifetime.

The works in the exhibition demonstrate Belson’s extraordinary technical control of color and light, the fundamental elements of his filmmaking. Many of his fastidious compositions, including his Target paintings from the early 1950s, feature kaleidoscopic concentric circles. As Belson described: “They parallel the motions in the cosmos where spheres are rotating around each other, and rotating themselves: the sun, the planets, everything is lined up and moving in circles.”

Belson started experimenting with hallucinogens in the early 1950s and did not consider his work abstract but rather a faithful record of altered psychic states. He explained, “I’m trying to focus on something, bring it back alive from the uncharted areas of the inner image, inner space.” Through these interior voyages he hoped to discover the universal, and many of his paintings and works on paper, with their highly centered primary forms, resemble sacred art.

This exhibition has been organized in association with Raymond Foye and the Estate of Jordan Belson.

This year marks the centennial of Belson’s birth. In addition to our exhibition, several screenings of his films will be presented in Los Angeles on this occasion: on June 25 and July 9 at 2220 Arts + Archives and on July 18 at The Philosophical Research Society.