James Bohary (born 1940 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American abstract expressionist painter. [1] He was born to an English mother (Alice Wood born in Bolton Lancashire in 1907) and an Indonesian father William. He has studied graphic design, illustration, drawing, as well as art education (B.S. from New York University). He emerged from the New York Studio School in 1969, where he studied painting and drawing with Philip Guston. [2] His influences include prehistoric art, Sassetta, Rembrandt, Cézanne, and Willem de Kooning.
His paintings, including the new ones, exemplify many characteristics of the abstract expressionism of the modernist period. They are painted in thick, multilayered impastos, gestural, heavily textured, and sometimes with a sense of horror vacui with gestural details extending over every area of the painting. His working methods [3] involve years of building dense masses of oil paint. A wet-in-wet layer is allowed to rest, sometimes over a long period, then more layers are added.
His paintings can be found in the following museums: the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, the National Academy of Design in New York City, the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame University, the Wellesley College Museum, and the Indiana University Art Museum.
Bohary has received numerous awards, including the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1985) and Certificate of Merit, National Academy of Design (1993). He was elected as a Full Member of the National Academy of Design (1994).
He has taught at such schools as Queens College, Parsons School of Fine Arts, New York Studio School, Binghamton University (where he still teaches) and Dartmouth College.
Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker. Considered a central figure in the development of American postwar art, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art movements.
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
Judith Godwin was an American abstract painter, associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Miriam Schapiro was a Canadian-born artist based in the United States. She was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and a pioneer of feminist art. She was also considered a leader of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Schapiro's artwork blurs the line between fine art and craft. She incorporated craft elements into her paintings due to their association with women and femininity. Schapiro's work touches on the issue of feminism and art: especially in the aspect of feminism in relation to abstract art. Schapiro honed in her domesticated craft work and was able to create work that stood amongst the rest of the high art. These works represent Schapiro's identity as an artist working in the center of contemporary abstraction and simultaneously as a feminist being challenged to represent women's "consciousness" through imagery. She often used icons that are associated with women, such as hearts, floral decorations, geometric patterns, and the color pink. In the 1970s she made the hand fan, a typically small woman's object, heroic by painting it six feet by twelve feet. "The fan-shaped canvas, a powerful icon, gave Schapiro the opportunity to experiment … Out of this emerged a surface of textured coloristic complexity and opulence that formed the basis of her new personal style. The kimono, fans, houses, and hearts were the form into which she repeatedly poured her feelings and desires, her anxieties, and hopes".
Włodzimierz Książek was a Polish-born contemporary artist based in New England, and since 2001 worked from a 6000 sq. ft. studio in Rhode Island. He was best known for his large-scale abstract paintings.
José Parlá, is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist whose work has been described as "lying between the boundary of abstraction and calligraphy."
Andy Denzler is a Swiss artist. His distinctive technique of distorting the freshly applied surface of his paintings has shaped his entire oeuvre in painting, printmaking, sculpture and drawing.
James Alphonsus Kelly was an American abstract expressionist artist whose career spanned nearly seven decades. Primarily a painter, Kelly also created graphic work especially during his early years in San Francisco from 1950 to 1953.
Sonia Gechtoff was an American abstract expressionist painter. Her primary medium was painting, but she also created drawings and prints.
George Peck is a New York-based visual artist. Born in Hungary, his work has appeared in exhibitions across the United States and Europe, and his work is represented in such museums as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, Kiscelli Museum in Budapest, and Museum of Modern Art in Sweden.
Charles Florian Cajori was an abstract expressionist painter who, through his drawing, painting and teaching, made a significant contribution to the New York School of artists that emerged in the 1950s.
Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune,The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson suggests her "richly colored monumental paintings evoke the moody landscape of her rural Irish homeland, summoning the force of J. M. W. Turner and Mark Rothko." She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (2013), among other awards. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.
William Nichols is an American artist known for highly detailed, tactile landscape paintings that combine physical scale with intimacy. His work depicts unassuming gardens, forests, ponds, and streams rather than grand vistas, in dense, close-up screens of foliage, thicket or water that immerse viewers within the experience rather outside it. Nichols developed his mature style in the 1970s, combining painterly traditions going back to Impressionism with reemerging movements such as Realism and Photorealism; critic John Perreault called his approach, "Photo-Impressionism." He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at OK Harris Gallery in New York (1979–2013), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), and Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon); his work belongs to many private and public museum collections. In addition to reviews in national publications, Nichols's work appears in several art historical surveys of Realism and landscape painting, including The Artist and the American Landscape and Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, among others. Critic Mac McCloud observed that Nichols's "meticulous craft and precise observation of shape, edge, color and light" rendered his work "almost beyond reality […] alive with growth and transformation, teeming with insects and sweltering weather and yet, in the eternal aesthetic paradox it is motionless." Gallerist Ivan Karp wrote, "the vital pulse" of Nichols's paintings defies "the conviction that 400 years of depictions of the natural world nullify the ability of living artists to produce landscapes of high consequence."
Harriet Korman is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.
Gilad Efrat is a leading contemporary Israeli painter and a professor at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Israel.
Wendy Edwards is an American artist known for vibrant, tactile paintings rooted in organic forms and landscape, which have ranged from representation and figuration to free-form abstraction. Her work has been strongly influenced by the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement and its embrace of ornamentation, repetition, edge-to-edge composition, sensuality and a feminist vision grounded in women's life experience. Critics note in Edwards's paintings an emphasis on surfaces and the materiality of paint, a rhythmic use of linear or geometric elements, and an intuitive orientation toward action, response and immediacy rather than premeditation. In a 2020 review, Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote, "Edwards's pieces are exuberant, edgy, and thoughtful ... [her] sweet, tart colors and delicious textures make the senses a gateway into larger notions about women and men, creation and mortality."
Lorraine Shemesh is an American artist whose practice focuses on painting, drawing, and ceramics. Since the early 1990s, she has created investigations of the human form that balance contemporary realism with an abstract expressionist concern for gesture, rhythm and pattern. Her best-known series depict active swimmers in pools viewed from above and underwater or intertwined, costumed dancers set in ambiguous, compressed spaces. In the 2000s, her work has increasingly moved towards abstraction, with figures dissolving into faithfully rendered optical phenomena or geometric patterning. Describing these qualities, Art in America critic Jonathan Goodman wrote, "being true to nature enables Shemesh to record a dazzling array of painterly gestures, some of them squarely within the tradition of Abstract Expressionism ... Her use of abstract effects in the service of representation is striking and makes her art complex."
Colleen Randall is an American abstract painter and art educator. Her work is rooted in the abstract expressionist and sublime traditions and the relationship between nature and human consciousness. Art historian Sarah G. Powers has written, "Like seasonal and climatic shifts, Randall's work responds to nature and weather patterns through materiality and form. As meditations on the impact of sublime natural forces, her paintings transport us from the material fact of painted marks on a surface to a rich and rewarding imaginative experience." Randall has exhibited at the National Academy of Design and The Painting Center in New York, the Hood Museum of Art, and Delaware Art Museum, among other venues. She lives and works in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with her husband, poet and professor Jeff Friedman, and teaches at Dartmouth College.
Andrea Belag is a contemporary abstract painter. Belag studied the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture after attending Boston University and Bard College. She was a Faculty Member at the School of Visual Arts, in New York from 1995 to 2021.