Dia: Beacon

The Dia: Beacon was a very different experience in comparison to any other museum I have been to. As a frequenter of New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the MoMa, the Dia: Beacon was a breath of fresh air, literally. The galleries were spacious and the white walls expansive. It made the viewer feel small and the artwork seem bigger, not in a grandiose sense but in a kind of homage to the artwork and the artists who designed it. The presentation of the works was a fuller and more complete experience than just a piece of art on a wall or a sculpture amidst a room of other sculptures.
The series of giant colored shapes by Imi Knoebel was especially powerful in engulfing the viewer in color. The piece embraces you, surrounding your vision so that it is all that you can see—massive canvases of color on a sea of white space. I also greatly enjoyed the floor to ceiling string frames by Fred Sandback. The string frames encompassed space, yet the series of frames took on a whole other dimension. Sol Lewitt’s drawing on walls redefined the typical use of line, and used lines, spaced at different intervals, to create hues of color.
While the museum contained many types of design and art, a unifying theme that I kept seeing was the great respect the artists had for their materials, and the specificity in which the materials were chosen. Wooden boxes with crazy wood grains (Donald Judd) were left unlacquered or painted, and the beauty of the organic material was allowed to breathe and to be exposed. Much of the artwork was on bigger scales, but instead of being menacing, there was a friendly, quirky element to many of the pieces, inviting the spectator to become a participator.