Biography
Norman Zammitt created sculptures, paintings, and lithographs that utilized color theory to capture the mythical qualities of natural light. Growing up in the Kahnawa:ke reservation near Montreal, he went on to serve as an aerial photographer in the Air Force during the Korean War. A key figure in the development of Los Angeles’ Light and Space Movement, he was a pioneering colorist whose work reflected the essence of the Movement. He is best known for the Band Paintings (1973), which were inspired by the enthralling and transcendental California light. He has been most definitely noted as a visionary who pushed materials and ideas of color theory.
He received his MFA from the Otis Art Institute in L.A., California in 1961, and exhibited at the prestigious La Cienega Boulevard Gallery. His “Boxed Figure” paintings shown at the University of New Mexico, received both controversy and censorship. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, and throughout the 1960’s had a significant role in the Finish Fetish Style, the “LA Look,” a style between Pop Art and Minimalism.
He exhibited regularly in multitudinous museums and galleries to include the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He has been described as an artist who “employs mathematical precision in hue to spiritual ends, building a body of work which resonates optically on the wavelength of the divine.”