Patrick Tidd

Patrick Tidd (born 1929) is a painter and educator who exhibited in San Francisco and Berkeley during the politically and aesthically tumultuous years of the 1960s and 1970s. Tidd showed regularly at the Berkeley Art Center, a Bay Area hot spot for avant garde art at the time. His paintings of the early 1960s, of which there are six in this sale, are beautifully-crafted enigmas. With their dreamy geometric forms and private symbolism they were described by critics as explorations for a new language and mode of expression beyond abstract expressionism, the dominant style at the time. His ingenuity and success in navigating this space made him a closely watched harbinger by Artforum and others. In the late 1960s and 1970s Tidd would settle on hard-edge symbol-scapes that combine elements of surrealist architecture and abstract forms to create a pop science fiction vibe.