Internationale Archives - Page 2 sur 6 - Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Chuck Close

Chuck Close is an American artist known for his photorealistic, large-scale portraits. Born in Monroe, Washington in 1940, Close graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1962 from the University of Washington, Seattle and went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in 1964. After graduation, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, worked as a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, and later moved to New York City in 1967 where he established his studio.

Close struggles with dyslexia and suffers from prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces, also called ‘face blindness’. Throughout his life, he found solace in turning to the arts. For the majority of his career, Close has focused on portraiture, mastering techniques such as watercolour, finger painting, pastel, graphite, and printmaking. His large-scale paintings are created from an initial gridded photograph of a subject to produce system-driven portrait painting.

His first solo exhibition was held at the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery in 1967 and his second was held at the Bykert Gallery, New York in 1970. He has since exhibited in almost eight hundred exhibitions at institutions and art festivals such as the MoMA, the 1979 Whitney Biennial, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, and many more throughout North America and Europe. His work was also selected to represent the United States in the 1993, 1995, and 2003 Venice Biennales.

Close is the recipient of numerous awards and honours including the Skowhegan Arts Medal (1992), the New York State Governor’s Art Award (1997), as well as the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton (2000). In 2010 President Obama appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. In that same year, Close was commissioned to create twelve large mosaics for the 86th Street subway station in New York City, and in 2016 his portrait of Paul Simon was used as the cover art for the singer’s album, Stranger to Stranger.

Today, after suffering from a spinal artery collapse in 1988, Close continues to work with brushes strapped to his wrist to help him paint large portraits, but in a style that is more abstract, drawing from low-resolution photos which appear pixelated from afar. His works remain highly sought after by museums and collectors.

George Condo

George Condo is an American artist known for combining Cubist-inspired faces with realistic forms to realistically represent the unreal, an approach that he has dubbed ‘Artificial Realism’. He blends elements from the European Old Masters with popular culture in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Inspired by notable artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Diego Velázquez, Condo created a surrealistic style for himself that he has also termed ‘psychological cubism’.

He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts and moved to Boston where he worked as a silkscreen printer after graduation. Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 and was soon after inspired to pursue a career in the arts. He began to exhibit at galleries in New York in 1981 and, during this time, he worked in Andy Warhol’s silkscreen production studio. As Condo progressed throughout the 1980s, he began exhibiting in more prestigious institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout Europe, a high point being his participation in the 1987 Whitney Biennial.

In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been an invited lecturer at prestigious institutions including Yale University, the Guggenheim, and Harvard University where he taught a six-month course titled Painting Memory in 2004.

Condo has received numerous commissions throughout his career including book covers, album artwork for rappers such as Kanye West, and t-shirt designs for Barney’s New York. He continues to exhibit extensively in North America and Europe in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York.

Robert Cottingham

Robert Cottingham is an American artist predominantly known for his paintings and prints of urban building façades, neon signs, and shop fronts. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. After completing his service in the U.S. Army, Cottingham studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963.

During the 1960s, he worked as an artistic director for an advertising firm while producing paintings inspired by the works of American Photorealists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler. Additionally, like many artists in the 1960s, Cottingham’s work was heavily influenced by Pop Art. His enlarged scales evoke the work of James Rosenquist and his employment of text echoes that of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana.

In 1964, Cottingham moved to Los Angeles where he focused exclusively on his art practice. He experimented with photography and used his photographs as a reference point for his paintings. In the 1970s he moved to rural Connecticut and, although removed from the urban environment, he continued to paint more expansive and broad urban landscapes.

During his career, he exhibited extensively, most notably at the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the Serpentine Gallery in London, England, and the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, South Korea. Cottingham continues to live and work in Connecticut.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, and conceptual performance artist. His artwork employs the use of nostalgic motifs, including Pinocchio, heart shapes, bathrobes, and tools that are both autobiographical and that focus on themes of personal identity and memory.

Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1957, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University. He moved to New York the following year and became known for his critical role in a group of artists who initiated ‘Happenings’, which is a genre of performance art that challenges the elitism of Abstract Expressionism.

Dine believes in the power of simple images because their familiarity is accessible and relatable to any viewer. Although he uses straightforward and popular imagery, Dine resists his connection to Pop Art. Instead, he insists that his work is an extension of the work put forth by artists who question the power of iconic symbols rather than exploit them, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In addition to his numerous international exhibitions, his work is included in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, the British Museum in London, England, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the MoMA in New York, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i. Today Dine lives in New York, Paris, and Walla Walla, Washington.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter known for founding the Art Brut movement (a French term that literally translates to ‘raw art’). This term was used to describe artworks made outside the realm of academic tradition, usually in reference to graffiti or naïve art – also called ‘outside art’. Dubuffet concerned himself with anti-culture and anti-art, dismissing conventional aesthetics. He challenged beauty standards, customary academic painting, and notions of realism. Refusing to believe in the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, Dubuffet deliberately chose to evoke the grotesque.

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre, France in 1901. Though well educated, he rejected the notion of formal institutions, preferring to study on his own. In 1918, he moved to Paris and studied for a short time at the Académie Julian until he withdrew after a brief six months. It was not until 1942 that Dubuffet decided to return to painting. He was heavily influenced by the paintings of Jean Fautrier, a painter of Tachism (or Art Informel). Dubuffet used a similar stylistic approach by applying texture to paint with the combination of sand, gravel, tar, and straw.

While post-war Paris favoured artwork that reaffirmed old values, Dubuffet preferred to create ‘low-brow’, childlike imagery that satirized high art. Opposed to an intellectual approach, Dubuffet sought out the work of children and the mentally ill. He admired their unrepressed style with which they could freely experiment, unrestricted by rigid art theories and normative trends.

His early work is comprised of portraits of everyday people with exaggerated, grotesque features. During the later years of his career, Dubuffet experimented with unusual mediums such as with ballpoint and felt tip pens. He also began to embrace the Surrealist idea of automatic drawing as a means to tap into the subconscious. Dubuffet used this technique to create the graphic style of his later series, Hourloupe (1962), which were comprised of clean black lines forming cells filled with unmixed color that showcased the contrast between physical and mental representation. He considered these works of art to be in their purest form. They would continue to occupy him for the next several decades.

Throughout his career, his work was exhibited in numerous exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. Today, his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Tate Modern in London, England. The Foundation Jean Dubuffet in Paris, France continues to actively collect and exhibit his work.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter. He grew up in Berlin in 1915 and studied there before fleeing Nazi Germany to settle in New York City in 1939. In the 1950s, he began creating Abstract Expressionist paintings while sharing a studio with fellow painter, Helen Frankenthaler. During this time, he exhibited in various galleries throughout Manhattan, eventually attracting the attention of renowned art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg included Dzubas’ work in his 1964 exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction.

Dzubas created his works by applying thick layers of paint over washes, which were rubbed into un-primed canvases. For his large-scale works, he experimented with various techniques to apply colour, such as staining and brushing with acrylic paints as well as with Magna paint, a brand of acrylic resin paint.

During his career, Dzubas taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Cornell University. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and 1968 as well as the National Council on the Arts Award that same year. Additionally, he had more than sixty solo exhibitions around the world. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, and numerous other institutions across the United States.

Janet Fish

Janet Fish in an American realist painter known for her large-scale still-life paintings. She often paints glass, plastic-wrapped fruit, or mirrors, paying particular attention to the depiction of transparency and reflections of light.

Fish was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938 and was raised in Bermuda. She studied printmaking and sculpture at Smith College, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in 1960. For her Master of Fine Arts, Fish attended Yale University from 1960-1963, where she studied under Alex Katz and alongside fellow prolific students such as Chuck Close and Richard Serra. In 1967, she had her first solo show at Fairleigh Dickinson University and her first full exhibition shortly after in New York City in 1969.

Fish currently lives and works in New York City and Middletown Springs, Vermont.
In addition to her art practice, she has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, Syracuse University, and the University of Chicago. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, as well as numerous other institutions throughout the United States.

Günther Förg

Günther Förg was a German painter, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer born in Füssen, Germany in 1952. He had a strong interest in modernism and developed a multi-disciplinary practice that combined artistic mediums and styles. His works recall Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, among others.

Förg studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1973 to 1979. It was there that he began to explore abstraction and minimalism, two aesthetics that would go on to greatly influence his body of work. Förg was also influenced by architectural styles like the Bauhaus, which favoured geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations.

Förg had his first solo exhibition at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery in Munich (1980) with a series of monochrome paintings. In 1992, he was represented at the Documenta IX, and in 1996, he won the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded annually by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is housed in the permanent collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Sam Francis

Sam Francis was an American painter and printmaker recognized as one of the most influential postwar American artists. He was born in 1923 in San Mateo, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley as a pre-med student. His studies were halted when he joined the Army Air Corps during World War II. Due to an illness caused by spinal tuberculosis, he left his military service and was hospitalized for extended periods of time over the next several years. It was confined to his hospital bed where he found his passion for painting.

After his recovery, he experimented with abstract and figurative works in the San Francisco area, inspired in part by the artistic trends dominating the 1940s – Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. He returned to Berkeley and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1949 and with a Master of Arts in 1950. After finishing his education, he moved to Paris where he worked throughout the 1950s while frequently travelling to the South of France, Mexico City, Tokyo, Bern, and New York. While in Paris, his style became associated with Tachisme, a French form of abstract painting with an intuitive form of expression. A Time Magazine feature in 1956 described Francis as one of the most popular American painters in Paris at the time.

Francis’ art has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work can be found in international museum collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, NY, the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo, Japan. During his career, he had more than one hundred solo exhibitions and, since his death, over ninety more. Today, the Sam Francis Foundation in California continues to organize exhibitions as well as donate artworks, manage archives, and provide education to the public about his art to preserve Francis’ legacy.

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was an artist working in the mid 20th century whose impact on artworld has been momentous. She made great contributions to the Abstract Expressionist movement and is praised for working as a woman in a predominantly male profession. Most famously, Frankenthaler invented the soak-stain technique of painting which consists of pouring thin paint directly onto unprimed canvases. This technique allows the paint to pool and seep into different parts of the work. The end result are colourful and raw artworks evocative of natural phenomena. Her soak-stained technique was instrumental in the development of Color Field painting which was practiced by many of her contemporaries including Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. This painting style has continued to define mid-century American painting.

Frankenthaler was born in 1928 and raised in New York City. She graduated from Bennington College in 1949 and began her professional career a year later. Her painting, Beach (1950) was selected for the exhibition, Fifteen Unknowns: Selected by Artists of the Kootz Gallery, which catapulted her career. She was the subject of major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Frankenthaler continued to reinvent the ways art is produced and experimented with a variety of mediums such as ceramics, sculpture, tapestry and print making, which she explored until her death in 2011.

Frankenthaler’s work is frequently re-examined throughout the artworld internationally. She is praised for her dynamism, her unique artistic methods and for her significance within feminism’s intersection with art history. Most recently, her work was presented in the MoMA’s exhibition, Making Space: Women and Artists and Abstraction (2017).