Norman Zammitt

Canadian, 1931 - 2007

BiographyThrough 1956-1961, he attended Pasadena City College and Otis Institutein Los Angeles on scholarship, earning his AA and MFA degrees. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1968 and a Pollock Krasner grant recipient in 1991. From 1963-1971 he taught at the University of New Mexico, the University of Southern California, and University of California Los Angeles. His Boxed Figured BlackPaintings (1962-1963) painted while at University of New Mexico, embarked on a series of work that dealt with the human body and its parts encased in boxes, set against a black or clear background. They were exhibited at a contemporary gallery in Santa Fe in 1964 but were censored at the University of New Mexico.

Zammitt was a member of LA’s Light and Space Movement which included artists Larry Bell, Helen Pashgian, Ron Davis, Peter Alexander,and DeWain Valentine. Beginning in 1964 Zammitt began to use of acrylic plastic resin in combination with transparent colors. shown for the first time in Los Angeles and New York. In 1972 he returned to painting, continuing his interest in color relationships explored in the earlier three dimensional work. Influenced by his experience in New Mexico, Zammitt was inspired by the sky and began to explore the abstraction of light in paint, to correlate palate and sky through a series of 60 Band Paintings (1974-1988). He began by mixing his own basic primary or “parent” colors, and from that eventually mixed colors according to his experience and ideas about how color can become another color, and another color, and another color, until it rounded the whole spectrum. He even began using logarithms and mathematical curves to graph progressions, giving the colors numerical values

Zammitt’s works have been shown in Santa Fe at David Richard Gallery and are included in collections at MOMA, New York City; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; and Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California, among others.

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