Budd Hopkins: Abstract Art and UFOs | Joe Bucciero
The earliest work in Guardian, an exhibition at Tara Downs of seven paintings by Budd Hopkins, is a small abstract tondo, a circular canvas with tracks of off-white paint rising from the surface and bleeding onto a thin frame. Hopkins made it in 1963, six years before the show’s next painting; it at once looks forward to his future output and remains something of an anomaly. Circles reappear, at least in part, in all the other works on view, but each of them is what the critic Michael Fried would call a depicted shape—painted on a larger, typically rectangular surface—and not the literal shape of the canvas. In 1973 the curator April Kingsley, then married to Hopkins, wrote that the circle was his “personal image.” It was, she argued, like Rothko’s rectangle or, one could add, Jung’s mandala, both an ordering device and the sort of emblem one might see in dreams or visions. In the late 1950s Jung speculated that the postwar glut of UFO sightings in the West—reports of objects with “round shape, …
