OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Born in Los Angeles in 1932, Robert Craig Kauffman (1932-2010) a childhood friend and classmate of Walter Hopps, and graduated from Eagle Rock High School in 1950. He enrolled in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, but transferred to Department of Art at UCLA in 1952, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1955 and Master of Fine Arts in 1956. Kauffman traveled and lived in Paris and New York during subsequent years, and also taught painting at the University of California from 1967 to the early 1990s. He subsequently took up residence in the Philippines, where he continued to work in a home and studio that he designed until his passing in 2010.
Cited as a seminal figure in the Los Angeles art world during the 1950s and 1960s, and Internationally recognized for his sensuous use of color and new materials, Kauffman first rose to the attention of critics and collectors with his major one-man show of paintings at Felix Landau Gallery in 1953. Kauffman was one of the original members of the legendary Ferus Gallery, and participated in the opening show, Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye. Kauffman also had a solo show at Ferus, in June of 1958, which was regarded by critics and his peers as a major and influential exhibition of painting.
During the 1960s, Kauffman began using the industrial process of vacuum forming, and proceeded to translate his sensuous forms to wall reliefs, painted on the reverse with sprayed acrylic lacquer. The works were shown first at Ferus, and subsequently picked up by Pace Gallery in New York, and by the summer of 1966, Kauffman?s? acrylic plastic wall relief paintings were featured on the cover of Art in America.