preview
the exhibition here
Adam
Baumgold Gallery presents the exhibition "Maryan:Works from the
60's," from September 5 through October 12,2002. The artist's
first New York solo exhibition in twelve years will focus on paintings,
works on paper and linoleum cuts that Maryan (1927-1977) executed
after he moved to New York in 1962.
Born
Pinchas Burstein in 1927 in Poland, Maryan and his family were arrested
in 1939 and placed in various labor and concentration camps. When
the Russians liberated the camps in 1945, Maryan had lost a leg but
survived. None of his family lived. Maryan was 18. After the war,
Maryan studied art in Jerusalem and moved to Paris in 1950 where he
studied art again at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and established his
reputation in Europe before moving to New York.
The
"Personnages" work from the 1960's show solitary figures
in often brutal, boisterous, aggressive, and theatrical poses that
are always executed with heightened colors, deft draftsmanship and
a formal elegance. The paintings and drawings depict figures caught
in the comedy of the human condition somewhere between Beckett's "Endgame,"
Commedia del Arte characters, Kafka and Goya.
The
exhibition features a large painting "Personnage," 1962,
that shows the twisted upper torso of a man in military uniform -
fingers bloody, tongue skewered defiantly to the side of his mouth
with two solitary red chess pieces on either side of his body. A series
of eight linoleum cuts from 1962 has costumed, seated figures with
part comical, part maniacal facial expressions and wildly gesticulating
hand movements. These works are done with a bold and crisp line that
is the organizing force in all the drawings and works on paper in
the exhibition.
Maryan's
work was linked at times to movements such as CoBrA, Nouvelle Figuration,
and other artists, among them Peter Saul, Philip Guston, and H.C.
Westermann, as well as the Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke,
but the very personal nature of his oeuvre makes it unique and original.
That Maryan was an artist provided him with the means to address his
life experiences on his own terms - his "Truth Paintings,"
as he called them, are "autobiographical" - "I will
be myself in any color I put on the canvas."
Maryan
was included in such ground breaking exhibitions as "Human Condition/Personal
Torment," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, as well
as "Ten Independents," in 1972, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. Maryan's work is in the permanent collections of The Museum
of Modern Art, NY, Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou,
Paris, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., among others.
The
gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 - 5:30 P.M.
*The essay "The
Work of Maryan: An Injunction to See," written by Jeanne Marie
Wasilik in the book "Maryan Behold a Man and His Work" was
an important source for this press release.
