NEW ACQUISITION
Tatara Fire: Rebirth in the Flames
Henry Mandell, American, born 1957, Tatara Fire, 2014. Acrylic inkjet on canvas. Museum purchase with funds provided by the contemporaries in 2014.
Will South, chief curator
“Patterns have their own rationale.
When patterns emerge from chaos one
can know things automatically, just
by looking. I am working clear my
perception of all the biases about being
in the world. Ours is a chaotic sensorial
world and abstraction is my way to
depict its essence.”
—Henry Mandell
July 2013, New York
Henry Mandell’s wall-sized mural, Tatara
Fire, is the first digital painting to enter
the CMA collection. This extraordinary
new acquisition was made possible by the
Museum’s young professionals membership
affiliate group, the Contemporaries. Tatara
Fire is on view in the second-floor atrium.
Visitors will ask, naturally enough, what is
it? As the artist has said, he understands the
world as sensual chaos, order balanced with
disorder. The sweeping lines and shapes are
extracts of text from stories and data that
spark ideas.
In Tatara Fire, words and data are gleaned
from the internet, placed in a digital
file made by the artist, and then layered
with color and shaped by hand—they
are part of the artist’s palette. The work
is about information as image. The result
of this highly individualized treatment
of source material is that lines and colors
combine into a rich visual metaphor about
unleashing energy. The final artwork no
longer refers to the literal flow of words,
yet contains the vestige of their structure.
As the artist puts it: “Meaning becomes
tangled and repurposed into the visual
language of abstract painting.”
With Tatara Fire, Mandell became
fascinated with the idea of transformation
though heat.
A tatara is a large, ancient Japanese kiln,
or forge, built out of clay with an open
top capable of smelting very pure steel
from iron sand gathered from a volcanic
site, mixed and melted with carbon
charcoal. Beginning a thousand years ago
and peaking around the 1400s, artisans
who had no technical tools where able to
transform these raw materials into a pure
form of steel that rivals any produced today
in beauty, strength, and purity. The Tatara
Fire mural is composed from text about the
process of building and using the tatara to
make Samurai swords, as well as historical
records of names and objects from many
museums and cultural sites related to tatara
production.
A second story of transformation is the
historic burning of Columbia 150 years
ago. Mandell researched the geographical
coordinates of sites that were destroyed,
as well as those that were damaged
but survived. Text and data from this
transformative event in Columbia’s history
were wedded to the story of the steel
being made from fire—something strong
resulting from something that was melted
by fire.
For a biography of the artist and to see
more of his work, visit henrymandell.com.
To learn more about the Contemporaries,
visit columbiamuseum.org.
columbiamuseum.org
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