Artist's pill-shaped marks dot buildings across L.A.

Now on view on buildings throughout Los Angeles: black lozenge-shaped marks.

 

In conjunction with the retrospective Richard Artschwager! at the UCLA Hammer Museum through Sept. 1, the museum and LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), along with the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, are presenting a citywide installation of Artschwager’s blps. Known for his association with pop art, minimalism and conceptual art, the American artist, who died this year on Feb. 9, coined the term (pronounced "blips") in the late 1960s.

 

Keep your eyes peeled for them. There are 35 attention-getting blps that can be found affixed to a lifeguard station at the beach in Santa Monica, a skate park in Venice, Fatburger in West Hollywood, Union Station in downtown and the Hammer Museum among other places throughout Los Angeles. There are also three blps at the Cosmopolitan casino in Las Vegas. The blps are meant to inspire focused looking and draw our attention to the places and things around us that often otherwise go unnoticed.

 

"Richard Artschwager believed the blp to be one of his most important works," said Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer and organizer of the presentation of 145 works by the artist, "so we are delighted to be able to spread them around the City of Los Angeles for people to seek out or to come upon by chance, having viewers become aware of the spaces around the blps, just as Artschwager intended."

 

Artschwager’s blps were first installed at UC Davis, and over the years, have found their way to numerous other public locations in cities across the United States and Europe, such as on subways and building facades, as well as in buildings, such as galleries. They have been produced in a range of materials, including vinyl, spray-painted stencils, wood and rubberized horsehair. The blps have transformed art spaces and city streets for decades, creating an opportunity for the "useless looking" the artist aspired to throughout his career.

 

Artschwager explored his artistic ideas through sculpture, painting and drawing. The Richard Artschwager! exhibit at the Hammer explains how he studied material, shape and style in his work. Alongside his contemporaries, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, Artschwager is widely known as one of the 20th Century "giants" who played a significant role in establishing American art’s formidable place in the art historical canon, according to the Hammer website.

 

The blps website has a downloadable map of blp locations and information about a social media contest for taking pictures of a blp.