A Fine Line Between Surrealism and Expressionism - Clara Ledesma

Clara Ledesma Terrazas (5 March 1924 – 25 May 1999)was an artist from the Dominican Republic.In 1949, Ledesma had her first solo exhibition and in 1951 she opened a studio/gallery, where she displayed her works as well as those of other artists. With the proceeds from a very successful solo exhibition in 1952, Ledesma traveled to Europe to further her education. She studied painting in Barcelona and Madrid, and exhibited her works in galleries in Spain. Ledesma also traveled to Lisbon and Paris to visit important museums. She was particularly influenced by the works of Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Paul Klee. During her stay in Europe, Ledesma met Bolivian artist Walter Terrazas, who returned to Santo Domingo with her in 1954."She studied painting at prestigious academies abroad and then returned to the country where she presented works that she had conducted in Europe under the influence of Miro, Chagall and Paul Klee, among others.In Santo Domingo, she worked closely with other important Dominican artists, including Gilberto Hernández Ortega, Josep Gausachs and Jaime Colson. In 1955, she was named vice director of the National School of Fine Arts.In 1961, Ledesma and her husband moved to New York City, New York, where she opened another gallery. She lived and worked in New York City the rest of her life.Ledesma had numerous international solo exhibitions, including events in Madrid, Mexico City and New York City, and participated in group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Argentina and Puerto Rico.
Ledesma's style ranged from Expressionism and Surrealism to Abstraction. She is known for her use of brilliant colors, imaginative figures and the feeling of magic and mysticism created in her paintings and drawings. In 1955, journalist Horia Tanasescu described her work, "At times ironic, often playful, but taking great care in the production of her paintings, this artist introduces an enthusiasm for life to the national art scene that is in striking contrast to the solemnity of the majority of her fellow artists.""“Ledesma also touched on social realism in her work, with her most noted series underlining the racial inequities of the time.”"She tried to represent native paintings, with concern, but away from the drama. One of her best stage was marked by the issue of blackness."Wikipedia

Sonia Gechtoff - Abstract expressionism

"American artist Sonia Gechtoff (1926–2018), whose work was featured in the landmark exhibition “Women in Abstract Expressionism,” organized by the Denver Art Museum in 2016, died on February 1, at the age of ninety-one. An important yet overlooked figure of the Bay Area Abstract Expressionist movement, Gechtoff was known for producing vibrant large-scale works featuring expressive gestural brushstrokes and thickly-applied layers of oil paint.Born in Philadelphia in 1926, Gechtoff began painting at an early age. Her father artist Leonid Gechtoff, a portraitist who painted former president Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover, encouraged her artmaking since she was the age of five. Gechtoff went on to study at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (formerly the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art) on a scholarship. Shortly after graduating in 1950, she moved to San Francisco and joined the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts, where she met her future husband, Abstract Expressionist painter James Kelly, who passed away in 2003. While in San Francisco she also met and was influenced by artists Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, and Elmer Bischoff.The artist had her first solo show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957. She had gained national recognition in 1954, when her work was exhibited in the “Younger American Painters” show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, alongside paintings by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. Her work was also featured in the US pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair; “Annual” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1958; the 1958 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh; and the 1961 São Paulo Bienal.
While Gechtoff and her husband permanently moved to New York in 1958, she attributed her success as an artist to the time she spent among the Bay Area arts community. “I felt that they treated me equally, that they weren’t thinking of me as a woman painter, but as another painter,” Gechtoff said. The artist found that the New York art scene was less accepting of women. For Gechtoff, San Francisco was “a very special place.” “I wish it would get more credit,” she said. “You know, people here in New York are so reluctant to admit that anything major went on there.”(artforum.com)

Gerome Kamrowski - Surrealism

Gerome Kamrowski (January 29, 1914 – March 27, 2004) was an American artist and participant in the Surrealist Movement in the United States.
He was born in Warren, Minnesota and begun to study art in the early 1930s at the St. Paul School of Art (now Minnesota Museum of American Art - MMAA), and later to the New Bauhaus in Chicago (now Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design). He then moved to New York to study with Hans Hofmann, where he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.In the late 1930s and early 1940s he lived in New York and had been working with surrealist automatism for several years. Kamrowski became an integral part of the emerging surrealists and collaborated with William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Roberto Matta. This group was the kernel of the open-ended movement that was referred to as abstract surrealism and would over time prove to be the beginnings of abstract expressionism.
Gerome Kamrowski was one of the few American artists to be included in Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in 1943. He also had shows at Museum of Modern Art in New York 1951, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art at several occasions. His work can also be seen in the Joe Louis Arena station of the Detroit People Mover [1]. He showed his work in the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. He was invited to the Paris exhibition by surrealist leader André Breton. Breton would say of him, "Gerome Kamrowski is the one who has impressed me the most by reason of the quality and sustained character of his research."In 1948 he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to teach at the University of Michigan School of Art. He stayed at the University of Michigan until his retirement 1982. Very few of his students over the next fifty years realized that their teacher was one of the most important artists in America. Gerome Kamrowski worked every single day at his art. He created massive domes of oil on canvas and brought strange, beaded animals to life. His work balances fluid automatism with powerful abstract imagery. The many layers of paint created a visual maze that clearly communicates an intuitive language with the viewer.Wikipedia

Clinton Hill - Abstract Art

Clinton Hill (1922–2003) was an American abstract artist who created abstract color compositions on canvas, constructions made from wood and canvas, wood and plastic relief sculptures, collage, woodblock prints and unique assemblages of handmade paper.Born in Payette, Idaho, and raised on a working ranch, Clinton Hill served in the navy during World War II as commander of a minesweeper in the Pacific. Upon his return from service, Hill attended the University of Oregon from which he graduated in 1947. He then moved to New York City, where Hill attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1949 to 1951."The work of Clinton Hill is characterized by a lyrical abstraction which is derived from the painterly tradition of the New York School" In 1951 he left for Paris where he furthered his art studies on the GI Bill at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and then on to Florence, Italy where Hill studied painting at the Instituto d'Art Statale."Clinton's Hill's first important works were made in the period after 1950s." Upon returning to NY, Hill prepared for his first solo exhibition at the Zabriskie Gallery. His friend Mark Rothko suggested the name of the show "Ladders and Windows;" and from that exhibit in 1955 forward, Hill had numerous one man shows in both the US and Europe. Over a 55-year period Clinton Hill has been included in close to 100 exhibitions."Hill would expand his interest in physically assertive surfaces and outline into outright sculptural relief" In 1958 Hill traveled to India on a Fulbright scholarship."Since the late eighties he produced pieces with a linear element running through the handmade paper, and sculptural forms utilizing wood, charcoal and oil, sometimes attached to canvas and sometimes freestanding pieces, using similar color balances" For over 20 years he was Professor of Painting at Queens College of the City University of New York.Wikipedia

James Rosenquist - POp ARt

James Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 – March 31, 2017) was an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop art movement. Drawing from his background working in sign painting, Rosenquist’s pieces often explored the role of advertising and consumer culture in art and society, utilizing techniques he learned making commercial art to depict popular cultural icons and mundane everyday objects. While his works have often been compared to those from other key figures of the pop art movement, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist’s pieces were unique in the way that they often employed elements of surrealism using fragments of advertisements and cultural imagery to emphasize the overwhelming nature of ads. He was a 2001 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.Wikipedia"James Rosenquist  was born in North Dakota and studied studio art at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. In 1955, he moved to New York City where he studied at The Art Students League for one year and met artists from the generation that preceded Pop art (the Abstract Expressionists). In 1960, he rented a studio in a building in lower Manhattan that housed several artists who also became well known, including Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin (whose studio Rosenquist took over). He became friends with other artists working nearby, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsburg were leading figures in American literature during this time while Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Thelonious Monk were predominant on the entertainment and jazz scene in the circles frequented by Rosenquist. Before renting the studio in lower Manhattan to focus on his fine art career, Rosenquist had worked as a commercial artist in Brooklyn and Manhattan painting the same motifs over and over. In his own words: I painted billboards above every candy store in Brooklyn. I got so I could paint a Schenley whiskey bottle in my sleep. From the late 1950s, along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist was instrumental in creating work that established what became known as a significant art movement: Pop art. He became particularly well-known for the use of visual advertising techniques and images repurposed for his fine art career in the 1960s and the huge billboard-size paintings he began creating in the 1970s. The inspiration for his compositional style and scale came from Rosenquist’s experience as a billboard painter in the American Midwest and in New York City in the 1950s. Some of Rosenquist’s works stand three to five meters tall and measure ten meters in length – one even exceeding 27 meters. “Rosenquist wanted to break with the idea of the picture plane in painting, instead creating the feeling of walking into an illusion. That’s the reason he used these massive and overwhelming, almost immersive, picture planes, which he, in some cases, constructed as entire spaces. Here, viewers are immersed by the work and will have the opportunity to dive into the painting in a visual sense,” says Lise Pennington, chief curator, ARoS, and curator of the exhibition. "(en.aros.dk)