Tracy Miller (born 1966) is an American painter. Her large-scale still life paintings of food have been included in more than ten solo shows and more than seventy group shows throughout the United States since 1992. [1] [2] In 2013 her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the American University Museum and was accompanied by a catalog [3] published by Feature Inc. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. [4]
Miller was born in Storm Lake, IA She studied at the University of Iowa (BFA 1989), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME 1992), and the University of California at Berkeley (MFA 1993). [5]
Miller is best known for her exuberant still life paintings of food that utilize a “vast array of techniques, including a sign painter’s folk realism, a loose, sketchy cartoonist’s stroke, and a Pollock drip” that come together in “chaotic buffets in oil." [6] Miller paints what she calls, “piles of guilty pleasure” [7] and her work has been described as a “vibrating cacophony of heady color.” [8] A May 2004 review in Art in America stated, “Miller’s paintings teem with as much activity and information as it seems they can bear, deliberately flirting with surfeit. Painterly abstraction is at least as integral to these works as their still-life components are, and their dizzying visual generosity underlines the symbiotic relationship between food and paint, and the inherently sustaining nature of both.” Her influences include Goya, Florine Stettheimer, Cézanne, van Gogh and Fairfield Porter. [9]
Miller’s work is in the collections of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Deutsche Bank, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Microsoft, SEI/West Family Collection, and the Sioux City Art Center.
“There’s a sensuality in Miller’s work that is at times breathtaking, and thus a painting of a simple row of doughnuts provokes a visceral, joyful response that’s not easily forgotten.” —Kristin Iversen, Brooklyn Magazine [10]
“Subtly situating her goodies among raucous candy-colored dabs of luscious paint, Miller strikes an unlikely balance among Technicolor Pop consumerist extravaganza, messy all-over abstraction, and sumptuous Old Master still life. If her beloved beer cans and bonbons appear lighthearted, her well-conceived compositions never fail to convey her seriousness as a painter.” —Meredith Mendelsohn, Art + Auction [11]
"Tracy Miller emerges as a kind of Huysmanian painter of contemporary life. She makes paintings that flirt with conventions of landscape, still-life, abstraction, and representation, but refuse the autonomy of any one of them—sampling at will and combining with unexpected alchemical results. She fills the canvas much in the way Huysman fills a room: with paradoxically united elements, raging alcholates that threaten to overwhelm, to subsume, to tip into the noxious, and which offer sensations more extreme than any that come to us purely by way of nature. There is a frantic, concentrated pleasure here, one that hints at the neurotic monstrousness produced by so many consumable goods. Yet the poker-faced humor of Miller’s works, packed as they are with fish and donuts and hotdogs and bananas and pie (so many potential allusions to ever-more guilty pleasures), render the works complicated and ambivalent—at once clamorous and mute." —Johanna Burton, Feature Inc [8]
“Canvases brimming with colors, animals, flowers and comestible items like pineapple upside-down cake seem like convergences of fantasies through paint.” —TimeOut New York [12]
Miller has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, [4] three Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards, [13] an Elizabeth Foundation Award, [14] a Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Grant, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters purchase prize. [5]
Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects.
Pollock is a 2000 American independent biographical drama film centered on the life of American painter Jackson Pollock, his struggles with alcoholism, as well as his troubled marriage to his wife Lee Krasner. The film stars Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Jennifer Connelly, Robert Knott, Bud Cort, Molly Regan, and Sada Thompson, and was directed by Harris.
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.
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American painter and visual artist active primarily in New York whose work has been associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, transitioning to war propaganda artworks during the War Services era.
Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Amy Sillman is a New York-based visual artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation. Her work draws upon art historical tropes, particularly postwar American gestural painting, as both influences and foils; she engages feminist critiques of the discourses of mastery, genius and power in order to introduce qualities such as humor, awkwardness, self-deprecation, affect and doubt into her practice. Profiles in The New York Times, ARTnews, Frieze, and Interview, characterize Sillman as championing "the relevance of painting" and "a reinvigorated mode of abstraction reclaiming the potency of active brushwork and visible gestures." Critic Phyllis Tuchman described Sillman as "an inventive abstractionist" whose "messy, multivalent, lively" art "reframes long-held notions regarding the look and emotional character of abstraction."
The Art of This Century gallery was opened by Peggy Guggenheim at 30 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City on October 20, 1942. The gallery occupied two commercial spaces on the seventh floor of a building that was part of the midtown arts district including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Helena Rubinstein's New Art Center, and numerous commercial galleries. The gallery exhibited important modern art until it closed in 1947, when Guggenheim returned to Europe. The gallery was designed by architect, artist, and visionary Frederick Kiesler.
Cora Cohen was an American artist whose works include paintings, drawings, photographs, and altered x-rays. Cohen is most known for her abstract paintings and is often identified as continuing the tradition of American Abstraction. In a 2023 review in Artforum Barry Schwabsky suggested that "Cohen’s determination to evade stylistic consistency has made her one of the most underrated painters in New York." The New York Times' critic Michael Brenson wrote of her 1984 exhibition, Portraits of Women: "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom." Cohen interviewed many other artists also associated with continuing the tradition of American Abstraction for Bomb Magazine including; Ralph Humphrey, Dona Nelson, Craig Fisher, Carl Ostendarp, and Joan Mitchell. Her work has also been identified with traditions of European abstraction, and specifically German abstraction, including the work of Wols, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter. She began exhibiting in Germany in the early nineties and continued to show at some of its most prestigious institutions.
François Fiedler (1921–2001), born Fiedler Ferenc, was a Czechoslovakia-born French painter and printmaker. He was an artist in the Aimé Maeght stable, which included Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially Visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Minimalism is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and a bridge to postminimal art practices. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Ad Reinhardt, Nassos Daphnis, Tony Smith, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Yves Klein and Frank Stella. Artists themselves have sometimes reacted against the label due to the negative implication of the work being simplistic.
Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.
Judit Reigl was a Hungarian painter who lived in France.
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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.
Louise Belcourt is a Canadian-American artist based in New York, known for elusive, largely abstract paintings that blend modernist formal play, a commitment to the physical world, and a visual language that shifts between landscape and the body, architecture and geometric form. New York Times critic Ken Johnson writes of her earlier work, "balancing adroitly between Color Field abstraction and Pop-style representation, Ms. Belcourt's paintings invite meditation on the perceptual, the conceptual and how our minds construct the world." Describing her later evolution, David Brody writes in Artcritical, "Hard-nosed Canadian empiricism and Brooklyn grit seem to combine in Belcourt’s work to undermine stylistic stasis."
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Amanda Church is an American artist known for abstract paintings that reference the human figure and other discernible elements. Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field. Church's distinctive use of contrasting style elements has been consistently noted by critics such as Hyperallergic's Cora Fisher, who described Church's work as "whimsically overruling the left-right brain dichotomy as well as the traditionally gendered axis that divides geometric and decorative art." Church received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, among other awards. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and Forbes Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited in major U.S. cities as well as internationally, in galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum. She lives and works in New York.
Caroline Kent is an American visual artist based in Chicago, best known for her large scale abstract painting works that explore the interplay between language and translation. Inspired by her own personal experiences and her cultural heritage, Kent creates paintings that explore the power and limitations of communication. Her work, influenced by her Mexican heritage, delves into the potentials and confines of language and reconsiders the modernist canon of abstraction. She likens her composition process to choreography, revealing an interconnectedness between language, abstraction, and painting. Kent's artwork showcases an evolving dialogue of space, matter, and time, resulting in a confluence of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and performance, blurring the lines between these mediums.