Charles Arnoldi / Michael Kohn Gallery
Charles Arnoldi
String Theory
Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
October 3 - December 19, 2026
Charles Arnoldi is now the elder statesman of West Coast painting. At 80 years old, he has a history of over 55 years of exhibitions world-wide, and a tapestry of works that trace the evolution of late modernist abstraction. Like some of his painter-colleagues, Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Brice Marden, et al., Arnoldi has consistently explored formal concerns of line, shape and color in order to advance visual complexity and emotional resonance.
This exhibition focuses on a series of paintings that Arnoldi created between 2016-2019, titled “String Theory.” While in Physics “String Theory” is an important research discipline, Arnoldi applied the series title due to the formal aspects of the paintings (although their complexity could surely be linked to physics in a future dissertation.) The ideas originated from a book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari where the author posits that humans developed unique cognitive abilities, including language and the capacity to imagine things that do not physically exist.
For Arnoldi, the idea of using his arm and hand to translate fluid lines to canvas, akin to surrealist automatic drawing, produces an image that is at once direct and complex. As layers of linearity stratify, the residual human energy of the lines increases. While Jackson Pollock used his body to spread paint, Arnoldi uses the edges of the canvas as guard rails; the structure of the canvas restrains the pictorial energy into an elegant equilibrium.
As this series progressed, within the linear intersections arose certain shapes that the artist filled with color. These forms were the result of human spontaneity, and make more sense, according to Arnoldi, than shapes made without the underlying artistic intervention. Almost Calder-like in their floating forms, Arnoldi’s “String Theory” paintings moved into a delicate balance of form and gesture that is the crux of successful Abstraction.
This series of paintings marks Arnoldi’s continuing mastery of method and abstraction. Fred Hoffman wrote in his catalogue essay for the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, “Early in his career, then, Arnoldi was able to assert his freedom from the ghost of repetition. This newfound independence thereby enabled the artist to more strongly identify himself with the commitment to invention witnessed in those masters who emerged as the New York School…” Indeed, abstraction was fostered on the East Coast after WWII, while their lessons in painterly emotion were intermingled with visions of Minimalism, Pop and subsequent artistic movements in Los Angeles.
