American artist and geologist Max Vityk, who was born in Ukraine and is currently living in Cairo, will be exhibiting his new series of sculptural paintings, Outcrops, from January 20 to May 13, 2018 at IMAS. These large-scale paintings appear to be completely abstract, yet are based on the most concrete of subjects—the Earth’s geological formations. As part of the exhibition, Dr. Vityk will be speaking about his research all over the world which has inspired his art work. The lecture and reception will be held on Thursday, March 1, 2018 starting at 6:00 p.m. and is free to IMAS Members and included with General Admission.

 

 Vityk has been fascinated since a young age by the intricate textures and colors of rock, and in 2013 he began to create the first of the Outcrops series. Named by geologists to describe an exposed section of bedrock on the Earth’s surface, outcrops are invaluable to scientists as they reveal hundreds, thousands and even millions and billions of years of geologic evolution. Outcrops become visible through the slow process of erosion, movement along fault lines, or sudden display brought about by manmade road cuts. Experimenting with foam and enamels, Vityk has developed a technique–durable but surprisingly light weight–that creates textures amazingly reminiscent of living rock formations. These textures ooze and flow, suspended on large-scale canvases as if at any moment they may succumb to the forces of gravity and drip from the wall.
 

 The colors, combined with craggy, undulating paint, speak to long-buried layers of prehistoric earth and, at the same time, to brilliant minerals too fantastical to be earth-bound. In his chosen palette for this series, Vityk creates a symbolic layering of geologic time. White refers to the ice ages, blue to ancient oceans, red to volcanic activity. The transition from blue to green depicts life emerging from the seas and moving on to land. Yellow is the Earth’s vital source of energy and symbolizes the formation of the solar system, as well as layers of sandstone sediments.
 

 Vityk’s Outcrops layer young rock deposits on top of older rock, just as they occur in nature. Beginning with Hadean time (four billion years ago), the Outcrops accurately show reds and yellows predominating. During the middle geologic period—Proterozoic and early Paleozoic—blues predominate, and in later periods, greens. And among all these ages, splashes of white correspond to mass extinctions caused by major ice ages. Awed by the vast age of our Earth’s core, the eye is also swept away by Vityk’s dancing lines of color, in a marvelous combination of geologist’s eye and painter’s brush.