Lewis Baltz. The Prototype Works

Beginning in 1965, but especially in the years between 1967 and 1971, Lewis Baltz made a body of work concentrated on the dialectic between simple, regular geometric forms found in the postwar industrial landscape, and the culture that generated such forms. Stucco walls, parking lots, the sides of warehouse sheds or disused billboards baked in the steady Californian sunlight. Baltz called his works “Prototypes,” by which he meant replicable social conventions as well as model structures of replicable manufacture.

Marking Baltz’s preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works continued his work to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild.

Lewis Baltz’s works have been the subject of over fifty one person exhibitions. Seventeen monographs have been published on his work. He came to prominence as a part of the ‘New Topography’ movement of the 1970s. Baltz studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate School in 1971. He is currently based in Paris and Venice.