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Gary Komarin
American artist (born 1951) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Gary Komarin (born September 14, 1951) is an American artist known for his abstract work.[2] His works are often characterized by spontaneous application, figuration, and painterly expression.
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Early life and education
Gary Komarin was born in New York City in 1951, the son of a Czech architect and a Viennese writer. He studied at the Arts League of New York and the New York Studio School and completed graduate work in English Literature.[3] He held a year-long fellowship with artist Philip Guston.[4]
Career
Komarin's work focuses on abstraction. He incorporates marks, titles, and prose, blending his literary background with visual arts practice.[5][6]
He has exhibited internationally, including in the United States, South America, Europe, and Asia. Selected exhibitions include:
- A four-person exhibition at 41 Green Street in New York titled "Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston, Bill Traylor, Gary Komarin."[citation needed]
- A four-artist exhibition in Dublin, Ireland, titled "Twombly, Motherwell, Poons, Komarin."[citation needed]
- A solo museum exhibition of large-scale canvases, "Moon Flows like a Willow," at the Musée Kiyoharu in Yamanashi, Japan.[7]
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Collections
Gary Komarin's works are held in the permanent collections of museums internationally,[8] including:
- Museum of Modern Art, Rome
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá
- Musée Kiyoharu, Japan
- Musée Mougin, south of France
Awards and recognition
Komarin has received several awards, including: [9][better source needed]
- The Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting, New York
- Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting, New York
- Elizabeth Foundation Prize in Painting, New York
- Benjamin Altman Prize in Painting, National Academy of Design Museum, New York
- Philip Guston Fellowship in Painting, *Boston University Graduate School of Fine Arts
- The Philip Hulitar[10] Prize in Art
- The New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Painting
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Publications and media coverage
Komarin’s work has been featured in publications, including:[citation needed]
Work and influences
Summarize
Perspective
Komarin has acknowledged influence from the New York School, particularly his mentor Philip Guston, with whom he studied at Boston University.[11] According to a New York Times article by Barry Schwabsky, “Guston's lesson in cultivating the unknown has clearly stuck with Mr. Komarin. And on a more superficial level, the teacher's peculiar sense of form can also still be traced in his former student's work – in the way Mr. Komarins' bulbous forms can seem to echo, in an abstract way, the cigars, cyclopean heads, and naked light bulbs in Guston's paintings.”[12]
Komarin prefers using non-art materials such as industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths instead of traditional painting surfaces. He builds layered surfaces using materials like latex house paint mixed with spackle and water. The house paint provides hybrid colors, and the spackle creates a matte surface. Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that “from these seemingly unlovely methods Komarin gets paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things as Matisse's driest most empty pictures, Robert Motherwell's spare abstractions of the 1970s, or the early New Mexico and Berkeley paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.” Komarin's Cake paintings, which he began painting in 1996, were discussed by Sarah King for Art in America, who wrote, "Komarin's most successful works are serial such as Pop Art-like cake images, in which versions of a crudely outlined central image are repeated against a succession of subtle lyrical backgrounds."
Describing Komarin's process in her essay for the 2012 catalog "The Road to Dialoro",[13] Carol Diehl writes:
For most artists there is no eureka moment; instead ideas develop through practice and over time, one thing leading to the next, and Gary Komarin is particularly sensitive to this intuitive process. If his marks appear awkward and childlike, it's because he has learned over the years how to turn off his internal critic and work from a place of detachment that allows for freshness, newness, and authenticity. Komarin has built into his working method ways of keeping himself from over-thinking or becoming too precious — techniques that allow him to get out of the way and almost let the painting paint itself. "When I have to become involved," he says, "is when it can feel burdensome." Komarin keeps things fresh and loose by doing several paintings at a time, working quickly on the floor on large squares of untreated, raw, canvas — sometimes even drop cloths — with big, inexpensive brushes and open buckets of latex enamel and other copious materials such as house paint or Spackle. There's an element of control, of course, but the paint may drip, splash or bleed in unexpected ways, gifts of accident that the artist may choose to keep or not. Those decisions, while still intuitive, draw on a stored knowledge base, a lifetime of observing and evaluating form, color, and line, so that when something happens, for better or worse, he recognizes it. Komarin sees this activity as a direct engagement with his materials, an exchange rather like collaboration, where he's not making something happen so much as encouraging it to happen. As he says, "I like to be surprised by my own work."
Komarin was included in a catalog exhibition in Dublin titled 'States of Feeling' with an essay by John Daly, featuring works by Robert Motherwell, Gary Komarin, Sir Antony Caro , and Larry Poons. In 2008, Komarin exhibited a large cake painting at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York. This catalog exhibition was titled: ‘Here's the Thing: The Single Object Still Life,” curated by Robert Cottingham. Komarin's work was shown alongside works by Andy Warhol, Christo, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, and others. Komarin has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. In 1996, Komarin's work was included in an exhibition at 41 Greene Street in New York City, along with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston, and Bill Traylor. In 2008, he had a solo museum exhibition at the Musee Kiyoharu Shirakaba in Japan. The exhibition and catalogue, Moon Flows Like a Willow, was organized by the Yoshii Foundation in Tokyo with galleries in New York, Tokyo, and Paris.[14] Komarin's work has also been included in curated group shows in New York, Dubai, and Zurich alongside works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jeff Koons, Yves Klein, and Joan Miró. Komarin has also exhibited in catalog exhibitions in New York, Bogota, Zurich, Dubai, Paris, Palm Beach, Houston, San Francisco, Denver, Assisi, and London in the past decade.
Komarin's work is held in various public and private collections globally. These include museums such as the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum South Texas, Corpus Christi; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Denver Art Museum; The Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento; Museum of Modern Art, Bogota; the Montclair Art Museum; the Newark Museum; the Boise Art Museum; the Zimmerli Museum; the Arkansas Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston University Museum of Fine Arts; the Yoshii Foundation, Tokyo; the Musee Kiyoharu Shirakaba, Japan; and the Musee Mougins, France.
He has received awards including the Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting, the Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting, the Elizabeth Foundation Prize in Painting, and the Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design Museum.
Corporate collections holding his work include Microsoft Corporation, Blount International, the United Bank of Houston, United Airlines, the Hyatt Corporation, AT&T, and American Airlines.
In 2020, Komarin had a solo exhibition at the Dado Museum in Seoul, Korea. This followed a solo exhibition at the Azjuelo Museum, also in Seoul, and inclusion in an exhibition titled "Kinesis" at the Neon Gallery in London.
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Exhibitions
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References
Further reading
External links
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