Craig Kauffman

Craig Kauffman studied architecture at the University of Southern California and art at the University of California, Los Angeles, completing his MA in 1956. Initially an abstract painter, he exhibited first with Felix Landau Gallery, and then became one of the prominent and influential artists that showed regularly at Ferus Gallery. In 1964, he began experimenting with transparent plastics using vacuum-forming technologies to create objects that were painted to appear ephemeral by modulating the light around them.

Kauffman’s bubbles experiment with the continuum of space, with surfaces that meld into the wall. This was a characteristic of 1960s and early-1970s Finish Fetish and Light and Space work, and it was seen as a strategy for merging the work with the environment and establishing, as seamlessly as possible, an interconnection of the object with the space of the surrounding room.