Marylyn Dintenfass

Last updated

Marylyn Dintenfass (born 1943) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. [1] She is primarily known for her oil paintings, which use a dynamic color palette and lexicon of gestural imagery to explore dualities in the human experience and everyday sensual pleasures. [2]

Contents

Early life and influences

Marylyn Dintenfass was born in 1943 in Brooklyn, New York and spent most of her early years in Brooklyn and then Long Island. She attended Queens College, and graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. During this time, the artist worked with Abstract Expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. Dintenfass explored new media and developed her own reaction to abstract expressionism with color, line, and gesture. Dintenfass acquired an appreciation for a broad range of materials that led to major sculpture installations composed of ceramic materials, steel, lead, wood, wax and a variety of pigments and epoxies. [3]

Following a tour of museums in Amsterdam, Paris and Rome, the artist made her way to Jerusalem in 1966. During this journey, the artist worked with painter Ruth Bamberger, studied etching and mingled with the artists and intellectuals of the city. [3] The result was Dintenfass's first architectural commission, to design the “Pop Op Disco,” Jerusalem's first disco. This commission allowed her to work with an array of materials to employ shapes, surfaces, textures, colors, and lights, all of which coalesced in her consciousness that would become important components of her mature personal visual vocabulary. Dintenfass also married and started her family during these years. [1]

Work

Paintings

Art critic Meredith Mendelsohn writes, “Dintenfass uses luscious colors, repetitive forms, and a gestural intensity that combines Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.” [4]

Dintenfass often works with oil paint on wooden panels fragmented into parts of a grid. "After completing a painting," writes curator and critic Lilly Wei in a study of Dintenfass' work, "Dintenfass literally takes it apart, treating each panel as a discrete entity, exchanging panels between works in an aesthetic mix and match as she searches for interactions and relationships of color and form that satisfy her sense of visual excitement, sparked by the frisson of the dissonant." [5] In an interview with critic Irving Sandler, Dintenfass speaks of the grid as a necessary, formal restraint for the passion of the gestural marks it contains. [6] Joyce Robinson illuminates; “Dintenfass is at heart, though, a painter, and the grid, with its reference to and notion of modular parts, has remained central to her artistic enterprise, functioning as a kind of Apollonian matrix holding in check the exuberant, vividly colored abstractions of this essentially Dionysian artist.” [7]

Lilly Wei adds, "Ultimately, however, Dintenfass is more sensualist than theorist, and her paintings owe much of their allure to their materiality and the dazzle of color. Her array of ripe, radiant, saturated hues—a palette of gorgeous diversity—can be silkily smooth and nuanced; boldly exuberant; or edgily, feverishly discordant." [5]

The artist's abstract imagery usually appears in her work as various forms of stripes or circles arranged across translucent layers of alternating matte and high gloss textures. [5] In a conversation with gallery owner, John Driscoll, Dintenfass likens these symbols to language that predates the written word, saying her "work relates to communication through the visceral channel." Rooted in autobiography, the artist's paintings also examine the contrast between what she calls the “micro” and the “macro.” At times the shapes simultaneously resemble cells under a microscope and visions of the cosmos. [6] Dintenfass' themes explore the dualities of everyday pleasures; depending on the focus of a series, her symbols might conjure characters, candies, car wheels, or paint itself. [2]

Sculptural Installations

Although known for her paintings, Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural installations. Her innovative use of mixed media (ceramics, epoxies, wax, pigments, steel, lead, wood, etc.) transformed understanding of what a “ceramic” work of art could be and firmly fixed her position and influence among a generation of mixed media artists expanding the traditional definitions and boundaries of object and materials to create modern art. The results came as architectural reliefs and installation sculptures unique to her organic but structural personal style. Similar to her paintings, Dintenfass developed a modular language of symbols, amalgams of line and curve, which she would combine to create detailed pictographic languages all her own, what she has called “organic alphabets.” As Ted Castle relates, “Ideas are furtive elements, stolen from the matrix, so as to be reformed by human genius into something unforeseen—a poem, a painting, a game of dominoes, a television set, a brick, a tile, a cup. Marylyn Dintenfass is a master of the transformation of ideas into palpable form.” [8]

Dintenfass has also been commissioned to create many large-scale installations, including works for the State of Connecticut Superior Courthouse; the Port Authority of NY 42nd Street Bus Terminal; IBM in Atlanta, Charlotte, and San Jose; The Baltimore Federal Financial Building; Ben Gurion University, Israel; Tagimi Middle School, Japan; and her 2010 project (and largest project to date) in Ft Myers, Florida entitled “Parallel Park.” [9]

"Parallel Park" is a site-specific artwork for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center's Parking Garage encompassing 30,000 square feet (2,800 m2). Dintenfass's images were enlarged to 10 times their original size employing specialized digitizing software resulting in 23 images, each 33 feet (10 m) high x 23 feet (7.0 m) wide and commercially printed with archival ink on Kevlar fabric and installed on all four facades of the parking structure. Each panel transforms the perimeter of the structure, creating a progression of changing images and colorful patterns, all of which are key elements represented in Dintenfass's paintings and drawings. These images and patterns recall architectural friezes, mosaics, and frescoes of the ancient, medieval and Renaissance artists as well as works by early modern artists such as the Synchromists and the Italian Futurists. [10]

Exhibitions

Dintenfass’ work has been included in more than 60 national and international exhibitions and more than a dozen solo shows including the Queens Museum of Art the Katonah Museum, The Greenville County Museum of Art and, at the Mississippi Museum of Art –an exhibition underwritten by the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2008, her work was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

More than 30 public collections hold works by Dintenfass, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Cleveland Museum, The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Dintenfass has twice been a MacDowell Fellow, was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artists Grant, and two National Endowment Project Grants. She was awarded the Silver Medal at the First International Exhibition, Mino, Japan, and the Ravenna Prize at the 45th Concorso Internazionale Della Ceramica D’Arte, Faenza, Italy. She was also a member of the faculty at Parsons School of Design in New York City for ten years. She is included in the recent book 100 New York Painters by Cynthia Maris Dantzig (Schiffer, 2006) and is the subject of Lilly Wei's recently published monograph Marylyn Dintenfass Paintings from Hudson Hills Press. [11]

Accomplishments and Academia

This artist has earned many honors in the art world. In 1983, Dintenfass garnered the Outstanding Achievement Award, Women in Design International Exhibition in San Francisco, CA. In Mino, Japan she was given the 1986 Silver Medal in the First International Exhibition. More recently in 2002–2003, she became a trustee at the Museum of Ceramic Art in New York City. [12] In addition to these honor, Dintenfass has been a MacDowell fellow and a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellow. The National Endowment for the Arts also gave her two project grants. Dintenfass has also become involved in academia. She was a visiting professor at the National College of Art and Design in Norway, Brezel Academy of Art and Design in Israel, Sheridan College in Canada, as well as Hunter College in New York city. Additionally, Dintenfass held a faculty position at Parsons School of Design (New York City) where she worked for 10 years. [13]

Related Research Articles

Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky.

Agnes Martin American painter

Agnes Bernice Martin, RCA, was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence". Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist. She was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004.

Helen Frankenthaler American painter

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.

Al Held was an American Abstract expressionist painter. He was particularly well known for his large scale Hard-edge paintings. As an artist, multiple stylistic changes occurred throughout his career, however, none of these occurred at the same time as any popular emerging style or acted against a particular art form. In the 1950s his style reflected the abstract expressionist tone and then transitioned to a geometric style in the 60s. During the 1980s there was a shift into painting that emphasized bright geometric space that's deepness reflected infinity. From 1963 to 1980 he was a professor of art at Yale University.

Ida Kohlmeyer American painter and sculptor

Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer was an American painter and sculptor who lived and worked in Louisiana. Kohlmeyer took up painting in her 30s and achieved wide recognition for her work in art museums and galleries throughout the United States. Notably, her work is held by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Ms. Kohlmeyer, a member of the Reform Jewish movement, played an active role in the New Orleans Jewish community throughout her life. Touro Synagogue displays much of her artwork in their synagogue and in the social hall.

Louise Fishman was an American abstract painter from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She lived and worked in New York City where she died, for many years.

Pat Steir American painter and printmaker (born 1940)

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with conceptual art and minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured "Waterfall" paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.

Joan Snyder is an American painter from New York. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1974).

R. H. Quaytman is an American contemporary artist, best known for paintings on wood panels, using abstract and photographic elements in site-specific "Chapters", now numbering thirty-four. Each chapter is guided by architectural, historical and social characteristics of the original site. Since 2008, her work has been collected by a number of modern art museums. She is also an educator and author based in Connecticut.

Nell Blaine American artist

Nell Blair Walden Blaine was an American landscape painter, expressionist, and watercolorist. From Richmond, Virginia, she had most of her career based in New York City and Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Valerie Jaudon is an American painter commonly associated with various Postminimal practices – the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, site-specific public art, and new tendencies in abstraction.

Ann Agee American visual artist

Ann Agee is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."

Mira Lehr

Mira Lehr is an American multidisciplinary artist, her practice encompasses painting, design, sculpture, and video installation. She creates abstract works inspired by the natural world.

Lilly Fenichel (1927–2016), was an American painter who explored abstraction through a wide range of media and approaches, with her various periods linked together by a common emphasis on color harmonies and expressive, often calligraphic gesture. Her earliest work is associated with second-generation Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.

Beatrice Riese

Beatrice Riese was an artist and art collector.

Sidney Goodman was an American figurative painter and draftsman from Philadelphia, PA who explored the human form. Goodman received public notice in the early 1960s for his oil paintings, leading to his inclusion in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. In 1996, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented a retrospective show of Goodman's paintings and drawings.

Judith Murray (artist) American artist

Judith Murray is an American abstract painter based in New York City. Active since the 1970s, she has produced a wide-ranging, independent body of work while strictly adhering to idiosyncratic, self-imposed constants within her practice. Since 1975, she has limited herself to a primary palette of red, yellow, black and white paints—from which she mixes an infinite range of hues—and a near-square, horizontal format offset by a vertical bar painted along the right edge of the canvas; the bar serves as a visual foil for the rest of the work and acknowledges each painting’s boundary and status as an abstract object. Critic Lilly Wei describes Murray's work as "an extended soliloquy on how sensation, sensibility, and digressions can still be conveyed through paint" and how by embracing the factual world the "abstract artist can construct a supreme and sustaining fiction."

Jackie Saccoccio was an American abstract painter. Her works, considered examples of gestural abstraction, featured bright color, large canvases, and deliberately introduced randomness.

Harriet Korman American painter

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.

Jaq Chartier is an American visual artist. Chartier gained recognition for her Testing series, abstract paintings that are also active visual records of Chartier's tests of her materials - how they migrate and change in reaction to each other, sunlight, and the passage of time.

References

  1. 1 2 Marylyn Dintenfass Paintings. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press. 2007. ISBN   978-1-55595-279-2.
  2. 1 2 "About the Artist". Marylyn Dintenfass Parallel Park. Hard Press Editions. Retrieved 13 September 2011.
  3. 1 2 "A Conversation," Marylyn Dintenfass Paintings. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press. 2007. pp. 27–46.
  4. Mendelsohn, Meredith. “Marylyn Dintenfass at Babcock Galleries.” Art News, Summer 2009: p. 124.
  5. 1 2 3 Wei, Lilly (2007). "Painting in the Here and Now," Marylyn Dintenfass Paintings. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press. pp. 17–22.
  6. 1 2 "Irving Sandler Interview with Marylyn Dintenfass". Video Interview. Julia Mintz Films. Retrieved 13 September 2011.
  7. Robinson, Joyce Henri. “Marylyn Dintenfass: The Art of the Sensual Grid.” (Exhibition brochure for Work in Progress: Marylyn Dintenfass, Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, 2006.)
  8. Castle, Frederick Ted. “The Clay Paintings of Marylyn Dintenfass.” Ceramics: Art and Perception, no. 8 (1992): 7–9.
  9. http://babcockgalleries.com/node/marylyn-dintenfass-quot;parallel-park-quot;-installation-information?mode=Gpag&action=galleryPressReleasePag&image=1 [ dead link ]
  10. Marylyn Dintenfass Parallel Park. Lenox, MA: Hard Press Editions. 2011. ISBN   978-1-55595-346-1.
  11. Dintenfass, Marylyn; Wei, Lilly; Driscoll, John Paul (2007). Marylyn Dintenfass: Paintings. ISBN   9781555952792.
  12. "Marylyn Dintenfass Biography – Marylyn Dintenfass on artnet". www.artnet.com.
  13. "Public Collections & Bio". MARYLYN DINTENFASS.