An art movement that expresses itself primarily through abstraction and installations, it refers to the contemporary consumer’s urge to go beyond what is needed and beyond one’s means when acquiring material goods. The works, based on excessive tendencies, are a commentary in and of themselves on materialism.
The tenets of the movement began to appear during the 1950's in the works of
European artists such as Frank Auerbach and Bram Bogart. The inaugural exhibition of Excessivism was held in
2015 at the
LA Artcore Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif., curated by Kaloust Guedel, author of the Excessivism Manifesto. The group was acknowledged by art historian and critic
Shana Nys Dambrot in an article about the exhibition printed in the Sept. 23,
2015 edition of The Huffington Post. An article about the movement itself was published February
8th,
2017 in the arts section of DiversionsLA.com