Frank J. Malina is one of the great pioneers of light and motion in art. He is an artist with an aesthetic vision which goes beyond the confines of the usual concept of painting to encompass the broadest implications of the universe. A rare combination of a highly professional scientific training together with his innate impulsion as a painter have given his work a scope and an outlook of such dimension that the spectator is led into new worlds of experience.

Malina was born in 1912 in Brenham, Texas, U.S.A., and laid the foundations of his internationally distinguished career in astronautics at the Agricultural and Mechanical University of Texas at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he received his Doctorate in Aeronautics with a thesis on rocket propulsion and flight. In 1944 he was co-founder with the late Theodore von Karman of the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where in 1945 he conceived and directed the design, construction and testing of America's first successful high altitude sounding rocket, the WAC Corporal. From 1947 to 1953, he worked at UNESCO in Paris as a Counsellor and Head of the Division of Scientific Research of the Natural Sciences Department.

During these years Malina, the artist, continued his work. He grew to feel, however, that the visual and psychological experiences which had emerged from the development of modern science and technology, which he wanted to express, demand a new form of painting. In 1953, in Paris, Malina decided to devote all his energy to the plastic arts ; he became absorbed by the problem of expanding the rigid limitations of conventional painting and began his search for another medium, which led to the incorporation of electric light and motion in his paintings.

His first non-traditional works were structures of painted string stretched within a canvas and from this he developed the use of fine wire mesh, first by attaching to it string and wire, then in the form of collages and, finally of works using the moiré effect produced by two layers of mesh, a kind of art now called " Op'art ". His profound artistic need , however, to break out from the limitations of even this new idiom inspired him in 1955 to introduce electric light into his work. His first static " Electro-paintings " led his first electric " mobiles ", which were, characteristically nearly always within the geometrical or an outer space concept. In this year, Paris was for the first time introduced to kinetic painting by his exhibition at the Colette Allendy Gallery.

But this was not all Malina was looking for, and in 1956 he evolved the system he named " Lumidyne " by which he created a new and supremely personal form of kinetic art. In his Lumidyne paintings, Malina creates by the use of electric light shining through painted moving and static elements, sometimes with the addition of a diffusing screen, works which are not only revolutionary in their technical aspect, but works of great poetic beauty. For much of his subject matter, Malina takes the visual realities and constructs revealed by science and technology. To stand before one of his works is to enter a fluid, shimmering world, which is none the less governed in time by an unwavering rationality.

Malina has also worked with kinetic paintings using light reflected on to a diffusing screen, with polarised light and with audio-kinetic paintings, in which motion is actuated by sound, such as music. For relaxation, he makes miniature paintings.

He has devoted much of his time since the end of World War II to international co-operation in astronautics and in art. He launched the international journal of the contemporary artist, Leonardo, in 1968 and is its editor. It is a unique journal designed for artists, in which artists themselves write on their work and which provides a bridge between developments in art and science.

He has exhibited in Paris, where he won the Valensi Prize in 1958 and the Signature Prise in 1970, and in Brussels, Mexico City, Zurich, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Washington, D.C, New York, London, Rome, Prague, Zagreb, etc. His works hang permanently in Paris in the Musée d'Art National, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, and the Musée de la Ville de Paris; and in museums in Lyon, France ; Krefeld, German Fed. Rep. , Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. ; Unesco, Paris ; National Gallery, Prague ; Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio, Texas ; Palace of Arts and Science, San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel. A kinetic mural measuring 2.5 by 3 metres stands in the Pergamon Press Building in Oxford, England.

Pauline Koffler.
Paris, 7 January 1971.