Balcomb Greene - Abstract Figurative Paintings

 

 Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art. They were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization.His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end…. In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit."Balcomb Greene contributed to modernist cause through his writings: "It is actually the artist, and only he, who is equipped for approaching the individual directly. The abstract artist can approach man through the most immediate of aesthetic experiences, touching below consciousness and the veneer of attitudes, contacting the whole ego rather than the ego on the defensive."Wikipedia

 

 

Uri Lifschitz - Israeli Contemporary Art

Uri Lifschitz ( 1936 – 2011) was an Israeli painter.
Uri Lifschitz was born on Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha. He served in the Israel Defense Forces paratrooper Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon. He began painting in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the founders of the 10 Plus group which posed an alternative to the lyrical abstract style of the New Horizons movement.
 "His artistic oeuvre marks aparting with the lyrical abstract, with painting which turns to the collective, toward figurative, personal painting. In this sense he is close to other artists born in the 1930s, such as Moshe Gershuni and Igael Tumarkin.His best-known series include The Schizophrenics—one of the most beautiful series ever created in Israeli painting, whose free, wild expression,which nevertheless struggles for its cohesion, epitomizes the unity of language and content.."(gordongallery)

Mary Abbott - American Abstract Expressionism

Mary Abbott (1921 –2019) was a prolific painter, an active figure in the New York School, and one of three female members of the Artist’s Club in New York, alongside Perle Fine and Elaine de Kooning. Abbott declared that her life’s work was “using the medium, paint, color and line  the poetry of living space.” She studied painting with Eugene Weiss and George Grosz, who remembered her “serious demeanor.” Her work was characterized by sweeping and energetic brushwork, as well as a use of vibrant color derived from her mood or her surroundings. Abbott’s influences ranged from her peers like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, to Old Masters like Cimabue and Tintoretto. She was also a former model for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as a distant relative of Samuel Adams.

Mattia Moreni

"Mattia Moreni was born in Pavia in 1920 and died in Brisighella (where he had moved to in 1966) in 1999. From the mid-1930s, Moreni favoured a naturalistic vision of things, figures, houses and landscapes, and, towards the 1940s, also portraits. It was a language that had developed during his studies at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, where he proposed introspective images with expressionistic tones. His first solo exhibition dates from 1946, at Galleria La Bussola in Turin, with paintings and drawings from the period when his visionary expressionism and destabilizing images took on the semblance of close-up compositions of fruit or animals. Standing out in these studies are some important aspects for his following career: the inclination to propose totalizing images, with a shallow perspective crowded with the “enlarged presence of objects” and an expressionistic, deforming tremor which went “way beyond the dialectal and illustrative and folkloristic order” of local derivations of “Nordic or more precisely Flemish models”. As of the second half of the 1940s, Moreni opened up to a more international dialogue, fascinated by non-figurative neo-cubist stimuli. In 1948-49 his research took an abstract bent (Galleria del Milione, Milan, 1947 and 1949; Venice Biennale, 1950) and his language gained international recognition with his participation at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1951) and Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan (1952)...Between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the artist devoted himself to self-portraits, with a series of Autoritratti denouncing an evolution in themes and language, accompanied by handwritten scripts of the image with no chronological correspondence to the images (dealing with his past, but also a hypothetical future). In this phase, the force of expression, rather than identification of the actual psychosomatic features, continued to take precedence (XXIX Premio Campigna, Santa Sofia di Romagna, 1985; and again in the same place, 1991 and 1992). The relations between image, background and script would continue to be simplified, resulting in the essential Umanoidi (1993) figures, a vast series of works displayed in two solo shows in 1994-95 in which the features consist of a technological box, alluding to a computer, which replaces the person’s face and mind (Ravenna, 1996; Faenza, 1999). […] “Moreni paints the premonition that, on its way towards an electronic and digital future, art will never be the same again."(alleriailponte.com)