The Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced Electric Op, the museum’s next special exhibition on view from September 27, 2024, to January 27, 2025. Featuring more than 100 works by nearly ninety artists, Electric Op will be installed across the entirety of the first floor of the museum’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, spanning roughly 9,000 square feet across six galleries, including the new Ronnen Glass Box Theater. The exhibition is curated by former Buffalo AKG Curator Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan and is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG and the Musée d’arts de Nantes, where it will be on view from April 4 to September 1, 2025. Artists whose work is featured in the exhibition include Richard Anuszkiewicz, Cory Arcangel, Max Bill, Angela Bulloch, Francis Celentano, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Al Held, Gary Hill, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Bridget Riley, Miriam Schapiro, Laura Splan, Stan VanDerBeek, Victor Vasarely, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Leo Villareal, Bill Viola, and John Whitney.

Drawing on the Buffalo AKG’s leading collection of Op art—established with the museum’s groundbreaking 1965 exhibition Art Today: Kinetic and Optic—Electric Op traces the six-decade history of the enduring relationship between Op art and electronic art and culture. Dynamic paintings, sculptures, and prints by international Op artists working in the 1960s and 1970s are placed into dialogue with analog videos and computer-generated prints and films of the same period, demonstrating how Op became “Electric.” The exhibition also includes more recent contemporary artworks from the 1980s onward that embody the sensibility of “Electric Op,” including paintings, sculptures of programmed lights, and even an interactive digital game. The exhibition concludes with a presentation of vintage ephemera and other cultural artifacts. Together, the objects and experiences in Electric Op demonstrate the profound role played by Op art in the development and emergence of the cultural and artistic expressions of the Information Age.

In the mid-1960s, a new movement called “Op” (short for “optical”) art took the world by storm. These dizzying, dazzling artworks embodied the energy of the emerging Space Age: Op painters used electric colors and machine-like precision to make geometric patterns that seem to vibrate or move, while Op sculptors utilized new, futuristic materials such as Plexiglas and aluminum. Some created mechanical and electronic sculptures that actually do move, including many that use kinetic light. As critic John Canaday wrote in 1965, Op artworks are “the only objects being created today, as art, that can compete with launching pads and industrial machinery as expressions of the character unique to our civilization.”

Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s relates to the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era. At the very moment that Op artists began making works that short-circuit our optical systems, new video and digital technologies began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Many Op artists would turn to these as tools in the late 1960s, and many of the first video and digital artists in turn openly referred to Op art for inspiration. Electric Op argues that Op art is more than just the final chapter of modernist geometric abstraction; it is also the first artistic movement of the global Information Age, heralding the transformation of vision from a mode of embodied perception to an algorithmic process executed by the computer systems that produce and process images today.

Electric Op will be accompanied by a large-format, bilingual (English/French) catalogue published by Giles, featuring full-page illustrations of nearly 100 artworks, including many that are rarely seen or reproduced. It also includes a major overview essay by the exhibition’s curator; three newly commissioned essays on Op art, the relationship between art and science, and computer graphics by leading scholars of these topics; and an anthology of writings by artists in the exhibition that address the relationship between abstraction and technology.

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Electric Op is made possible through the generosity of the Generative Art Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support provided by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

The exhibition catalogue is presented by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Additional support for the catalogue is provided by the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME).

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About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright- Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth oldest public art institution in the United States. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In June 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG opened anew to the public. The project is funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

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