Robin Rosenberg Fine Art, Author at Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean-Paul Riopelle was one of the first Canadian artists to achieve notable international recognition, considered by many to be one of the most important Canadian artists of the postwar, twentieth century. As an Automatist, he was one of the original signatories of the Refus Global, along with Pauk-Émile Borduas. Extremely prolific, Riopelle produced over six thousand works, including more than two thousand paintings, throughout his career.

Riopelle was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923 and began taking drawing lessons at the young age of ten. In 1942, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. Inspired by André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, he experimented with non- representational painting. In 1947, Riopelle moved to Paris where he associated himself with the Surrealists. His first solo show took place in 1949 at the Galerie La Dragonne, a popular Surrealist meeting place in Paris.

Riopelle kept a studio near Giverny, France in the 1960s alongside American painter Joan Mitchell, with whom he had a romantic relationship with for the next two decades. During this time, he experimented with other mediums including ink on paper, watercolour, lithography, collage, and sculpture. In the 1980s, Riopelle moved back to Quebec and established his studio in Estérel. Here, he experimented with representational subject matter and aerosol spray cans.

Riopelle’s style is distinguished by a thick layering of hastily applied paint, a technique he employed in order to complete a painting in one session. He prepared all of his colours beforehand and applied them onto large canvases with a palette knife, a spatula, or a trowel. Depending on the gloss finish he applied, light reflects off the surface of the paints in different directions and with varying degrees of intensity.

Riopelle has received many accolades for his significant contribution to Canadian art history. His work received an Honourable Mention at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1952 and his work was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and, again, in 1962. He participated in the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1953 and received an Honourable Mention at the Guggenheim International Award exhibition in 1958. Moreover, retrospectives of his work have been held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City, the Fondation Maeght near Saint Paul-de-Vence, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, and at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.

William Ronald

William Ronald was an influential Canadian painter, best known as one of the founding members of the artistic group, Painters Eleven, a Toronto-based group of Abstract artists active during the 1950s, partaking in their first exhibition of 1954. His abstract compositions are characterized by their spontaneity and energy, which he achieved through his particular method of applying paint in an automatic, unplanned manner.

Ronald was born in Stratford, Ontario in 1926. After graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, he started producing abstract works. Feeling shunned by the Toronto art-scene, he worked for the Robert Simpson Co., a department store where he paired abstract paintings with furniture displays with the intention of persuading the public to embrace non-representational art. With Toronto’s growing resentment towards abstract art, Ronald moved to New York City in 1952 where he shared a studio with Frank Stella and studied at the Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts. In 1957, he had his first exhibition at the Samuel Kootz Gallery where his work was well received by art critics and collectors alike.

In addition to painting, Ronald was a successful journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and was a columnist for the Toronto Telegram. He hosted TV and radio variety shows including, As it Happens (1969-1972) and The Umbrella (1966-1967). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Ronald moved back to Canada and actively painted in various cities across the province of Ontario. He enjoyed painting in public venues, often hiring strippers to dance around him while he painted. He continued to paint until his death – literally – as he suffered a heart attack while painting a canvas 1998. He named the work in question, Heart Attack, before passing away several days later.

Ronald was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and his work is part of collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, among numerous others.

James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist was an American painter regarded as one of the chief artists of the Pop Art movement. He is best known for his enormous collage paintings drawn from advertisements and popular culture. His paintings are so large, they cover entire gallery walls, completely enveloping the viewer in his assemblage of consumer goods, weapons, celebrities, etc. The artist’s fascination with pop culture reflected his social, political, and cultural concerns.

Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1933. His mother, an amateur painter, fostered her son’s creativity by frequently taking him to art classes and museums. In 1952, Rosenquist began studying at the University of Minnesota under the painter Cameron Booth, an Abstract Expressionist who had worked under renowned painter Hans Hofmann. During university, Rosenquist worked as a commercial artist hand painting large-scale signs and billboards. The materials and techniques used for advertising greatly inspired his work. He was one of the first artists to address the exploitative power of the deceptive and omnipresent qualities of advertising.

Rosenquist’s oeuvre has inspired generations of artists. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, as well as The Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas. His works can also be found in many prominent galleries and museums internationally.

Ed Ruscha

American Post-War artist, Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Oklahoma City where his family relocated in 1941. He moved to Los Angeles after graduating high school to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of Arts).

After graduating, he worked as a graphic designer for an L.A advertising agency which greatly influenced his work as an artist. His early interest in commercial art inspired him to create artwork that challenged traditional hierarchies of painting and prevalent artistic styles such as Abstract Expressionism. Although he continues to reject the labels of Pop or Conceptual artist, Ruscha certainly incorporates elements of both artistic movements into his paintings and photographs. Borrowing from tropes of advertising, he creates word-paintings which explore the noise and fluidity of language. The isolated words and phrases featured in his paintings and prints are often glib in nature and stem from pervasive colloquial clichés and vernacular culture. Since his early years as an artist, Ruscha has also been greatly influenced by the landscape of his home city, often incorporating vacant parking lots, swimming pools and nightspots into his compositions.

Ruscha is known for employing unusual and untraditional media in his paintings and drawings. Some examples include gunpowder, blood, fruit juice and Pepto Bismol.

Ruscha’s first solo show was held at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Other major exhibitions have been held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Centre George Pompidou in Paris, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among many others around the globe. He has also been the subject of several retrospectives in New York, Washington, D.C, London and Paris. Notably, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 2001. The artist continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and printmaker known for his large-scale sheet metal works. Born in San Francisco in 1938, he studied English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 but later transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1961. From 1961-1964, Serra studied painting in the Master’s program at Yale University where he was greatly inspired by artists Philip Guston and Josef Albers. While in university, he supported himself by working in steel mills, surrounded by a material that would greatly shaped his career as an artist.

Serra’s first sculptures were abstract, process-based, and made of non-traditional material such as fiberglass, rubber, and molten lead. In 1969, he worked with the process of both cutting and stacking materials to create large structures that could balance on their own. This process contributed to the creation of his minimalist works, which he is most well known for today, many of which are commissioned public art pieces. In addition to sculpture, Serra has also worked and experimented with performance, video, prints, and drawing.

Serra lives and continues to work in Tribeca, New York as well as in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. His sculptures can be found in the collections of the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California.

Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff is a Canadian artist who was born in 1975 in Kelowna, British Columbia. She has an interdisciplinary art practice with a focus on photography, sculpture and video. Her work depicts semi-abstract, geometric forms that emphasize the formal characteristics – such as volume, shape and mass – of her artistic subjects.

In 1998 Shirreff received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in Visual Arts. In 2005, she went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. Shirreff is interested in the relationship between two and three dimensional spaces. She uses flat images and works on paper to represent architectural structures and sculptures that appear flattened or two dimensional.

In 2005, Shirreff received The Hayward Prize for Fine Arts from The Austrian-American Foundation. In 2011, Shirreff was the recipient of both The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has also won the Aimia/AGO Photography Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Shirreff’s work is included in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

Shirreff currently lives and works in New York.

Frank Stella

Born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936, Frank Stella has become a renowned American painter, sculptor and printmaker. Stella attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts where he first learned about Abstract Modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. Later, he attended Princeton University where he majored in History. Stella took frequent visits to New York galleries during his years of study, exposing himself to artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Jasper Johns.

After graduating in 1958, Stella moved to the Lower East Side of New York where he quickly garnered attention in the art world. At the young age of 23, the MoMA purchased one of his works and included four in its 1959-1960 exhibition, Sixteen Americans. Famed gallery owner, Leo Castelli, decided to represent Stella’s work in that same year. In 1970, he was the youngest artist to have a retrospective at the MoMA and he was the first living artist to have a second retrospective seventeen years later.

Stella’s work emphasizes form rather than content. He famously referred to one of his paintings as “a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more.” His abstract paintings have no pictorial illusion, nor any psychological or metaphorical references. His artistic style, characterized by colour variations and circular motifs, is credited with influencing major movements such as Minimalism, Color Field Painting, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Moreover, he inspired major theorists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Michael Fried. The esteemed Clement Greenberg regarded Stella’s work as corresponding with his concepts of flatness, the integrity of the picture plane, and the optical integrity of compositions.

Today, Stella lives and works in New York City. He is one of the most recognized and well-known postwar American artists.

Donald Sultan

American painter, sculptor and printmaker, Donald Sultan, was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951. He obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and his Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975. During his studies, Sultan abandoned conventional methods of painting and began experimenting with different techniques, surfaces, and media. Today, he is best known for his large-scale, still-life paintings where he employs industrial materials such as tar, enamel, and vinyl tiles.

His fame in the art world first stemmed from his involvement in New York’s “New Image” movement. His first solo exhibition was at Artists Space in New York in 1977. In the 1970s and 1980s, his work was exhibited at the Mary Boone Gallery, the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum, and modern art museums in Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His art is both nonfigurative and representational, exploring the boundaries between the everyday and the abstract. Later in his career, Sultan transitioned his focus from industrial subjects to subjects of nature.

His work has been part of numerous exhibitions and resides in prominent public and private collections internationally including the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, the National Gallery of Australia in Parkes, Tate Modern in London, England, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum, in New York, NY, among others. In addition to numerous grants and honours, Sultan was awarded honorary degrees from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington D.C., the New York Academy of Art, and the University of North Carolina. Today, he lives and works in New York City.

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter associated with the Pop Art movement known for his colourful paintings of everyday objects. His work showcases objects such as pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs. With his use of heavy pigments, exaggerated colours, and starkly defined shadows Thiebaud developed a unique style that recalls the aesthetics of advertisements of his era.

Thiebaud was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920 and his family moved to Long Beach, California when he was an infant. When he was young, he apprenticed at Walt Disney Studios for a summer where he drew ‘in-betweens’ for characters such as Goofy, Pinocchio, and Jiminy Cricket. In 1938, he began working as a cartoonist in both California and New York. From 1942-1945, he worked as an artist for the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Force. In 1949, he studied at the San Jose State University and later at the California State University, Sacramento.

After teaching for several years in California, Thiebaud moved to New York City where he became friends with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and also became influenced by the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. When Thiebaud moved back to California, he began painting and experimenting with subject matter and style. His work was included in one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in 1962 at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, which gained him national recognition. Although associated with the Pop Art movement, Thiebaud does not classify himself as a Pop artist. He thinks of himself merely as a painter. In fact, he dislikes the flat and mechanical style of many Pop artists.

Thiebaud’s work is in the permanent collections of many museums and institutions across the United States such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. In 1994, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art from the American Academy of Design in 2001.

Claude Tousignant

Claude Tousignant is a Canadian artist whose work is considered to have been integral to the development of Geometric Abstraction. In the 1950s, he was associated with the Modern art movement, les Plasticiens, a group who celebrated an orderly style of painting devoid of spontaneity.

Tousignant was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1932. Encouraged by his family to pursue a career in art, he attended the School of Art and Design at the Musée des Beaux-Arts from 1948-1951. He also spent time abroad in Paris studying at the Académie Ranson, but ultimately returned to Montreal in 1952.

Tousignant is best known for his circle paintings composed of large, target-like rings of various colours that explore the effects of optical illusions and colour studies. His circular motifs create vibrating, rhythmic forms with sharp clean edges that aim to challenge the senses. His intention was to create purely abstract works that ensured minimal interference between the painting and the viewer’s experience of colour.

His work has been shown in exhibitions internationally and is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Musée d’art contemporain and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and many more. Tousignant continues to explore optics and sensory perception in his painting practice.