News
On view: “Gathered at the edge of light” at Albert Merola Gallery
Bay Rain III, 2009, oil paint on linen, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm)
Michael Mazur: Gathered at the edge of light
June 12 - July 1, 2020
Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown MA
The Albert Merola Gallery is happy to present our first exhibition of 2020: paintings by Michael Mazur. The title, Gathered at the edge of light comes from a passage early on in Dante’s Inferno. It is appropriate in many ways, not least of which is that Mazur was deeply involved with Dante’s masterwork, and had a deep love of all things Italian. One of his major accomplishments was the epic illustration of the Inferno. He made drawings, monoprints, and a complete suite of etchings, illustrating the story of Dante and Virgil’s journey through Hell. This accompanied the translation done by Robert Pinsky, a United States Poet Laureate and dear friend of Michael and Gail Mazur.
The paintings in the current exhibition reflect two different periods - The Branching paintings are from the mid-1990’s, and the Rain on Water are the last series that he worked on before his death in 2009.
Michael Mazur lived his life as an artist. He was never not observing or drawing or thinking about work. He was deeply interested in the human condition, as is evidenced in his Locked Ward Series and portraits, but was deeply moved and involved with the natural world, and how the two interacted. Studies from nature were always part of his practice. The beautifully lush Tendrils, or Blue Branching, evoke dreamy worlds between nature and abstraction. These branching forms were also incorporated into some of the Dante imagery he created.
The Rain on Water series is endlessly fascinating. Water into water - reflecting in the light, ceaselessly combining and reforming. These are beautiful, colorful, joyous celebrations of the most transient and ungraspable images. They express the fleeting sense of time and motion, while uniting all the deeply felt abstract imagery that Mazur had explored for much of his lifetime.
For many years Michael Mazur painted in his studio on the water in Provincetown. His studio was, literally, often “on the water”, as it sat on the harbor beach, and the tides would wash up underneath. This proximity to the shoreline would infiltrate his work, as is seen in Bay Rain III - a breathtaking summation of all those things, expressed in a view of Provincetown harbor.
Mike’s contributions to the Provincetown art community and its history have been significant and wide-ranging. He founded the Provincetown Print Project in 1990, and was the driving force behind five years of the Fine Arts Work Center’s Print Project Portfolio. The print room there is named after him in recognition for his contributions to the practice and to the Work Center.
We’d like to give special thanks to Gail Mazur for her support and guidance and to Bryan Smith for his invaluable assistance in making this exhibition possible.
Michael Mazur had been making prints, drawings and paintings for over 50 years. His work has been shown in over 150 solo and group exhibitions, and is included in most major public and private collections throughout the country.
His work has been exhibited at MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A traveling retrospective of his prints opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2000. He was a full time faculty member at RISD, Brandeis University, and later, a visiting artist for many years at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. He served on the Boards of the Artist Foundation in Boston, MA, the Council for the Arts and Humanities, and was an Overseer of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Mazur was on the Board and Visual Committees of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and was its Co-Chair from 1997 until 2001.
On view: “Late Work, Rain and Flowers” at Ryan/Lee Gallery
Michael Mazur: Late Work, Rain and Flowers
October 25 – December 22, 2018
RYAN LEE is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Michael Mazur (1935–2009). Known for his virtuosic facility with painting, drawing and printmaking, Mazur remains celebrated for his relentless drive to create and reinvent. Late Work, Rain and Flowers presents a selection of paintings and previously unexhibited drawings that were made in the final years of Mazur’s life.
Throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, Mazur explored a range of styles, techniques and subject matter. He often worked in series and in various media at once, experimenting with stencils, airbrushing and printing on silk. Content impelled him, whether he was responding to social injustice or absorbing aesthetic traditions of the Far East. As Mazur explained to Robert Brown in a 1993 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, “…content drove my engine, but the form always interested me, in terms of its relationship to the content… form-making, the facture of making paintings or drawings or prints, that has interested me and had its influence on me throughout all the work.”
This mutually constitutive relationship between form and content in Mazur’s oeuvre is particularly evident in the stylistic divergence between these two late bodies of work. While each treats an elemental form of nature, the fragility of the flower drawings presents a stark contrast to the power and dynamism of the pounding rain in the oil paintings. In the Rain paintings the viewer is subsumed, both caught in torrential downpour and somehow under water. The simultaneous horizontality and verticality in Bay Rain III (2009) suggests visual access from above as well as head-on while also presenting a Rorschach-like reflection of itself. Combined with rocks and ripples rendered in turquoise, cerulean and lavender, the resulting image evokes creation and disintegration. By contrast, Mazur’s floral drawings are delicate and minimal. Despite limited mobility during a period of recovery in the last year of his life, he produced over 100 ink drawings of plants and flowers—many of which had been given to him by his wife or observed in his own garden. Executed in black ink, these intimately scaled images seem to hover, emerging and receding from the negative space.
Taken together these last works by Mazur illustrate the dueling potentialities of nature and art. As Mazur explained when the Rain paintings were first exhibited in 2009, shortly before his death, “all good and great paintings provide a whiff of mortality and, ultimately, are a celebration of the life force; they are both the tunnel and the light at its end... Light and dark, color and its absence, form and anti-form all contribute to this.”
Michael Mazur (1935 New York, NY – 2009 Boston, MA) is an internationally recognized artist known for his fluidity between paintings, drawings and prints as well as between abstract and representational imagery. Born and raised in New York City, Mazur moved to Massachusetts in 1953 and received his BA from Amherst College. He received his BFA and MFA from Yale University in 1959 and 1961, respectively, and he was later heralded by The Boston Globe as one of the greatest painters and printmakers that New England produced in the second half of the 20th century. Mazur first exhibited in 1960 and quickly earned acclaim, receiving a
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters fellowship in just two years. Mazur was invited to represent the United States in the 1975 Venice Biennale, but he declined to participate in protest of the Vietnam War. Over the next 50 years, he was the subject of more than 80 solo exhibitions and included in numerous group shows. In 2000, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a retrospective which traveled to Stanford University Art Museum, the Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Mazur’s work is held in several prominent collections, including the British Museum, London; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; de Cordova Museum, Lincoln; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
On view: “Along the Shoreline" at Albert Merola Gallery
Albert Merola Gallery of Provincetown, MA presents
Michael Mazur: Along the Shoreline,
featuring oil paintings, monoprints, and other work.
For many years Michael Mazur painted in his studio on the water in Provincetown. His studio was, literally, often “on the water,” as it sat on the harbor beach, and the tides would wash up underneath. This proximity to the shoreline would infiltrate his work, and in fact, one of his signature series is titled "Rocks and Water."
The exhibition opens June 15 and runs through July 4, 2018
Opening: June 15, 7 to 9 pm
424 Commercial Street, Provincetown
For directions and more information, visit the Gallery's website.
Article: Michael Mazur’s Inferno of Dante: The Artist and Me Plus Dante and Suzanne
Michael Mazur’s Inferno of Dante: The Artist and Me Plus Dante and Suzanne.
By Eric M. Zafran
Michael Mazur’s “Inferno: Canto II, Twilight.”
From “A Perspicacious Tenure, Suzanne Boorsch at Yale.”
Looking back over my life and career, I realize that I was very fortunate in who I met and the choices I made. The first lucky move was choosing to attend Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. It not only had the Rose Art Museum, where I became an intern and got my earliest professional museum experience, but also had outstanding art history and studio art departments. Unusual was the school’s requirement that art history majors take courses in studio art. Thus it was that I found myself in 1965 in a life-drawing course being taught by Michael Mazur. I knew nothing of him as an artist, but he was a demanding yet understanding teacher. He quickly recognized that I was hopeless at life drawing and so recommended that I transfer instead to his printmaking class. At the time, I had no idea that this was Mazur’s first year at the university (where he would remain for ten years) and that he (a student of leonard Baskin) was already recognized as a distinguished printmaker, who would eventually become quite renowned. For me, he was a rigorous professor whom his students wanted to please, and it was he who provided me with an introduction to the techniques of woodcut, engraving, and etching. This proved invaluable knowledge, as I do not think anyone who has not handled the tools and engaged in the process can really appreciate the works of Durer, Rembrandt, Goya, or Picasso. Mazur gave his students great freedom to develop their own approach and experiment with these various media. I responded to the challenge and selected a large metal plate to produce an elaborate etching and aquatint that to me still retains a certain direct intensity and brings to mind my involvement with the printmaking process and my interaction with a brilliant artist.
This experience was to have long-lasting influence on my development. I went on to New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and had my first job in the Print Department of what was then Parke-Bernet Gallery, followed by an internship in the European Paintings Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Metropolitan Museum, I met the incredible staff of the prints department, which included, at that time, A. Hyatt Mayor (who became my master’s thesis advisor) and Suzanne [Boorsch], who would become a good friend and colleague. Suzanne remained there until moving to Yale, and I went on to a variety of curatorial positions, ending up as her neighbor in Connecticut, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. I was so pleased to discover that among Suzanne’s many distinguished acquisitions at Yale was Mazur’s remarkable portfolio of etchings, The Inferno of Dante, illustrating the translation of his friend the poet Robert Pinsky.
The subject had interested the artist since he had first read Dante as a student in 1957, but it was not until the early 1990s, when working in close collaboration with Pinsky, that Mazur produced a powerful series of monotypes of which a number were incorporated into the book published in 1993. As Mazur has observed, “We were both focused on the original. Dante was the visionary after all. We collaborated with him. We are two Jews who saw in the poem not the dogma of the church but a great contribution to the humanistic tradition in literature… Overall the tone was one of sadness and loss. This had to be communicated through both language and image.”
While the published version of The Inferno was very successful, Mazur felt that his images needed to be seen as individual plates, accompanied by text translations, rather than captions, and so he began working on a new set of etched illustrations, which were first exhibited at the castle of Dante’s patron, Cangrande della Scala, in Verona, Italy. Over a six-year period, from 1997 through 2002, a set of forty-one etchings was completed for the present grand two-volume portfolio, in which the images are juxtaposed with handsomely printed pages that have the text in both Italian and English.
Previous illustrators of Dante’s text, including the rather theatrical Gustave Dore, with whose works I had coincidentally been much concerned, depicted in realistic fashion Dante and Virgil on their journey through Hell. Here, instead, as the poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz has rightly noted, “Everything we see is, as it were, through [Mazur’s and Pinsky’s] eyes. Mazur’s images compel us to identify with the poet’s primary experience: the bewildering sense of space -- swirling, often mysteriously dislocated; the stupendous grandeur of the infernal architecture; the grotesque tortures of the sufferers and their profound pain.”
To capture these fantastic visions, Mazur employed the rich texture of the black-and-white etchings, printed on bright white paper, to portray the hallucinatory subjects in a near-abstract fashion. There are far too many brilliant images to detail in a short appreciation, but for me the series is truly launched by the plate accompanying canto 2, Twilight, which makes brilliant use of light and dark to evoke the words:
Day was departing, and the darkening air
Called all earth’s creatures to their evening quiet
While I alone was preparing as though for war…
I commenced: “Poet take my measure now;
Appraise my powers before you trust me to venture
Through that deep passage where you would be my guide.”
As if rising from a mountaintop, the spirit of the poet, surrounded by birds in flight,
ascends through a starry sky toward a haloed space set within a glowing circle.
The series of images concludes in startling and thrilling fashion with a final “landscape” for canto 34, titled Once More the Stars. It depicts, in a burst of swirling blue -- the first time color appears in all the prints -- the hill of Purgatory, which, as Schwartz writes, “looks very much like the false hill of ascent in canto 2. But this time, the image through the lens is heavenly -- stars swimming in the firmament.” The poet’s text reads in part:
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
Michael Mazur died in 2009 at the age of seventy-three, and I am sorry that I never got to thank him for his profound influence on me or praise in person his powerful works. Hopefully, this short text will acknowledge his achievement and prove that his memory is still vividly alive both at Yale and wherever great art is appreciated.
# # #
Editor’s note:
Images: Use Twilight from this page. Caption: Michael Mazur, etching, Twilight, from Il Inferno di Dante.
Recent Gifts on display at Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Twelve works on paper by Michael Mazur were recently presented by Gail Mazur to the Provincetown Art Association & Museum. Consisting of monotypes and charcoal drawings made in 1989, this cycle of images depict seagulls fighting over and devouring a dead skate, a scene Mazur witnessed on the beach at Provincetown.
The pictures, most of which had never before been exhibited, were on display as part of the PAAM’s "Recent Gifts" show.
From the Archive: “Series of Thought”
The Common | A Modern Sense of Place
Written by Betsey Garand
November 3, 2017 Issue 14
Documentaries on Mazur's Monotype Process Now Available Online
The documentaries, Making Monotypes: the Art of Michael Mazur (15 min) and Wakeby Day, Wakeby Night: a Monotype Mural By Michael Mazur (29 min), are now available for online viewing.
Each video explores the creative practice and theories of this important American artist. In Making Monotypes, Mazur demonstates the techniques involved in monotype, the printmaking medium he revolutionized between the 1980s and 2000s. As Mazur creates a pair of monotype images of an amiryllis the camera captures each step of the process, accompanied by an insightful and informative narration by the artist.The subject of "Wakeby Day, Wakeby Night," is one of the most ambitious monotype projects in printmaking history, Mazur's monumental installation commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Again, the viewer is given an intimate and detailed look at the materials and methods of this distinctive process, from initial sketches through final printing. Interviews and narration by the artist explain and illuminate the process.Taken together, these two short films provide an understanding of the art of monotype as well as the artistic philosophy of this brilliand and innovative prinmaker and painter.
On view: Mazur and Monet at Currier Museum
Michael Mazur's painting "Pond Edge" (1996) was on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, in conjunction with the exhibit "Monet: Pathways to Impressionism” July 1, 2017–November 13, 2017
Mazur's picture, which is in the museum's permanent collection, was included in a room of work relating to Monet:
"In the same vein as Monet, and the French Impressionists, Mazur sought to paint his impression of nature, rather than a realistic depiction of the scene. Pond Edge alludes to forms in nature while remaining dreamily abstract."
Michael Mazur “Pond Edge,” 1996, oil on canvas, 52 in. x 74 in. (132.08 cm x 187.96 cm) Collection of the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. Henry Melville Fuller Fund, 2003.14
From the Archive: Remembering Michael Mazur, Betsey Garand gallery talk at Mead Art Museum
JUNE 1, 2017
Perspectives on Michael Mazur: Gallery Talk with Betsey Garand, Senior Resident Artist at Amherst College and Gail Mazur, Poet and wife of the late Michael Mazur
Friday, May 26 at 2:30pm Mead Art Museum
A new exhibition at the Mead Art Museum honors the memory of one of the most distinguished artists to have graduated from Amherst, during what would have been his 60th reunion year.
During Reunion weekend, alumni attended a gallery talk honoring the memory of artist Michael Mazur, who died in 2009. Michael Mazur might be the best-known visual artist to have graduated from Amherst. A painter and printmaker, he earned acclaim for reviving the use of monotype prints. Today, his works are in permanent collections around the world, including the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.But before that, Mazur was an undergraduate attempting to figure out his life and career. As Senior Resident Artist Betsey Garand explained at a gallery talk during Reunion last week, Mazur’s legacy began with his ambitious senior thesis project, An Image of Salomé. Influenced by a gap year spent studying art and Italian in Florence, Italy, Mazur’s thesis included 16 hand-carved woodcuts and wood engravings illustrating texts from the Bible, Oscar Wilde, Gustav Flaubert and Stéphane Mallarmé. He made 34 prints of each illustration, and had them bound, with accompanying text, into large, hardcover books. “He printed it all himself,” Garand says, “and it was really quite an accomplishment.”
That thesis, never before displayed in a museum exhibition, is now on view at the Mead, alongside Mazur’s vibrant pastels, large-scale gestural paintings and well-known prints, including Dante's Inferno. The exhibition honors the memory of the artist, who died in 2009, during what would have been his 60-year Amherst reunion. “You can see in all of his work that he really loved getting into the material,” Garand says. “Whatever material and idea he worked with, he fully invested himself in it.” Garand worked with Mazur in 2004, when he visited Amherst as the Robert Frost Library Fellow and spent a week working with students in the printmaking studio in Fayerweather Hall. “His visit had a lasting effect on all who were involved, myself included,” she says. At the time, Garand was well-acquainted with Mazur’s work, having studied it herself as a student at the University of New Hampshire. “He’s an incredible artist who certainly influenced my work,” she says. “I show his work every semester to my students.”
Garand gesturing towards Mazur's painting "Drift IV" (2003).
One such student is David Le ’17E. Upon seeing Mazur’s works during a class visit to the Mead, Le says, “I was astonished by the techniques used in making them, and wanted to learn about the process involved in creating these images.” While taking Garand’s “Printmaking I” and “Working in Series” courses, Le says that with Mazur’s works in mind, he enjoyed exploring techniques for creating intaglio and monotype prints.As part of his own senior project, Le created a series of monotypes inspired by a childhood memory of accidentally setting curtains on fire in his living room. “Betsey mentioned that they were similar to Mazur’s diptych titled Window Sequence (1974), which surprised me,” he says. “I was unaware of how much Mazur’s works had inspired my own artistic practices.”The exhibition, Perspectives on Michael Mazur, remains on view at the Mead Art Museum through Dec. 16, 2017. It includes works from the Mead collection, a copy of Mazur’s senior thesis project from Amherst’s Archives and Special Collections and generous loans from Mazur’s classmates H. Axel Schupf ’57 and Bob Keiter ’57. It is organized by Vanja Malloy, curator of American art, with support from Garand and Gail Mazur, poet and wife of the late artist.
See more photos of the exhibition in the Flickr photo gallery
Perspectives on Michael Mazur at the Mead Art Museum
Michael Mazur at Mead Art Museum
In celebration of one of the most distinguished artists to have graduated from Amherst College, the Mead Art Museum has organized the exhibition Perspectives on Michael Mazur to honor his memory in what would have been his 60th reunion year. Michael Mazur (1935-2009), Class of 1957, was a talented painter and printmaker, as well as a dedicated teacher and arts advocate who held positions at esteemed institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design, Brandeis University, and Harvard University.Throughout his 50-year career as an artist, he demonstrated an astounding stylistic range. Mazur worked in many media, especially printmaking, in which he mastered techniques including aquatint, lithography, and monotype. His artworks have been acquired by numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.The Mead Art Museum holds an important collection of Mazur’s work, and this exhibition combines the Mead’s collection with generous alumni loans to illustrate the sweeping range of Mazur’s oeuvre. The show will include many works that have never been shown in public before, such as his senior thesis An Image of Salome, in addition to his vibrant pastels, large-scale gestural paintings, and well-known prints, such as Dante's Inferno.
Opening Reception, Thursday, May 25 at 5 p.m. Mead Art Museum
Free & Open to the Public
For more information
News: Michael Mazur at Barbara Krakow Gallery
Michael Mazur: Drawings 1959 - 2009
May 2, 2015 - June 6, 2015
Barbara Krakow Gallery
10 Newbury StreetBoston, MA 02116
News: “Michael Mazur: The Inferno of Dante” at The Print Center
Michael Mazur: The Inferno of Dante
April 17 – July 11, 2015
The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA
The Print Center continues its Centennial year with Michael Mazur: The Inferno of Dante, which brings together over twenty etchings from the artist’s masterful portfolio of prints. Mazur’s work has been highlighted in over a dozen exhibitions at The Print Center, including a solo exhibition of his work in 1965.
Michael Mazur, Canto VII (Paolo and Francesca), 1999; Courtesy of Ryan/Lee Gallery, New York, NY
From the Archive: True Monotypes Exhibition at IPCNY
March 26, 2015 - May 30th, 2015
IPCNY 508 West 26th St, Room 5a, New York, NY 10001
Artists in the exhibition are Chuck Arnoldi, Romare Bearden, Cecily Brown, Gregory Crane, Paul DeRuvo, Valentina DuBasky, Joellyn Duesberry, Carroll Dunham, Mary Frank, Lawrence Gipe, Sue Heatley, Jasper Johns, Jane Kent, Joyce Kozloff, Maya Lin, Judith Linhares, Eddie Martinez, Michael Mazur, Kate McCrickard, James Nares, Anne Neely, John Newman, Elizabeth Peyton, Matt Phillips, Susan Rothenberg, Sara Sanders, Dana Schutz, Richard Segalman, Stuart Shils, Steven Sorman, David Storey, Philip Taaffe, Donald Traver, Mary Jo Vath, Chuck Webster, William Weege, Christopher Wool, and Lisa Yuskavage.
From the Archive: Performance of Michael Hersch's string quartet, "Images From a Closed Ward"
The seventh movement of Michael Hersch’s string quartet, “Images From a Closed Ward,” as played by the Kreutzer Quartet at St. Gabriel’s Church in London during the fall of 2014. This short film by Richard Anderson is made up of photographs of the ensemble interleaved with the haunting etchings of American artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009), which inspired the music.
I first came into contact with artist Michael Mazur's work in 2000, while I was living in Italy. An exhibition of Mazur's The Inferno of Dante, a series of forty-one etchings with accompanying texts of Dante translated into English by Robert Pinksy, was being shown at the American Academy in Rome. Viewing the collection of etchings was a deeply moving experience. Soon after meeting we became friends, and Mazur would often stop by the space I used to work in where I would then play through for him some of my own work at the piano. Almost a decade later, I began work on a string quartet; the catalyst for which was an encounter the previous year with two groups of etchings done by Mazur in the early 1960s: the Closed Ward and Locked Ward series. The images are devastating ones. Why I was attracted to them, how they resonated with and why they haunted me, are for reasons that remain personal. That said, the fact that visual art became something of an ignition point was a very new experience for me. As the summer of 2009 wound down, I had formulated the broad outlines of the work enough that I decided it would be a good time to re-connect with Mazur, with whom I had not spoken in some time. I was extremely excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and sharing the terrain of this new quartet. I felt that he would be surprised and pleased that something he had done had a hand in the shaping of this new work. The day before I planned to contact him, I read of his untimely death in a Sunday newspaper.
– Michael Hersch, October 2010
From the Archive: Some Follow-up Thoughts on Michael Mazur (1935–2009), by John Yau
Art critic, John Yau offers some follow-up thoughts on his recent and compelling essay at Hyperallergic about the late painter Michael Mazur.
Michael Mazur: Stoneham Zoo featured in New York Arts
Michael Miller writes about Michael Mazur's recent exhibition “Stoneham Zoom” at Ryan Lee Gallery.
“Michael Mazur: Stoneham Zoo (1976-1979) at the Ryan Lee Gallery, closing November 15, 2014,” New York Arts, an International Journal for the Arts, November 14, 2014.
Michael Mazur: Stoneham Zoo (1977-1979) October 16 – November 15, 2014
Ryan Lee Gallery
515 WEST 26TH STREET, NY 10001
A selection of Installation shots of the current exhibition at Ryan Lee Gallery.
RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Michael Mazur: Stoneham Zoo (1977-1979), a selection of paintings and monumental pastel portraits of caged primates. This is the first time these works have been exhibited in New York since the artist’s groundbreaking show at Robert Miller Gallery more than 30 years ago. In the late 1970s, during a strong realist movement in the art world, Mazur returned to the subject of captivity, a theme which recurred in several phases of his career, beginning with his renowned hospital series, Closed Ward (1962-63), which portrays the most afflicted residents in a psychiatric ward. Throughout is life, Mazur addressed the individual human condition as well as society’s role in exploitative policies and systems of confinement. The work demands of himself and viewers recognition of the abused and forgotten. The American Way Room (1968), a wall and floor installation in an empty storefront where viewers walked over images of victims of the Vietnam war, brough his anti-war position to public spaces. His monotype collaboration, with poet laureate Robert Pinsky, of Dante’s Inferno confronts states of relentless anguish.
In a 1993 interview with the Archives of American Art, Mazur said “I decided to do some work on the monkey cages at Stoneham Zoo, which were very depressed and reminded me of the mental hospital. It was a strange return to the hospital work via the world of animals.” His mastery of pastel is essential to the Stoneham Zoo pieces. The medium provided him with a way to combine elements of drawing and painting. Pastel’s directness of touch gives a vsiceral feeling of movement. The primates are on edge, yet in stasis. Tangible despair and the inhumane nature of zoos are conveyed in these portraits of the primates in their looming, barren cages. Light and shadow capture the dualities of passitivity and tension within the images. A psychological intensity is heightened by Mazur’s extreme color choices.
Michael Mazur (1935-2009) is internationally recognized for his paintings, drawings, and prints. He experimented with and moved fluidly between ideas and media. He was invited to represent the US in the 1970 Venice Biennale, but declined to participate in protest of the Vietnam War. He exhibited widely in 160 solo and group shows, and in 2000, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a major traveling retrospective. His work is in several prominent collections, including the British Museum, UK; Castelvecchio Verona, IT; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; de Cordova Museum, MA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; McNay Art Museum, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; and Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, NJ.
The Human Image, Nagoya Japan
The Human Image is survey of work by European and American figural artists from 1945 to 2010, including a selection of Michael Mazur's work. The exhibition is located in Nagoya, Japan at the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Art . The show is up from 20 September–30 November 2014.
Michael Mazur: Stoneham Zoo (1977-1979) October 16 – November 15, 2014
Ryan Lee Gallery
515 WEST 26TH STREET NY, NY 10001
TUESDAY-SATURDAY, 10AM – 6PM
RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Michael Mazur: Stoneham Zoo (1977-1979), a selection of paintings and monumental pastel portraits of caged primates. This is the first time these works have been exhibited in New York since the artist’s groundbreaking show at Robert Miller Gallery more than 30 years ago. In the late 1970s, during a strong realist movement in the art world, Mazur returned to the subject of captivity, a theme which recurred in several phases of his career, beginning with his renowned hospital series, Closed Ward (1962-63), which portrays the most afflicted residents in a psychiatric ward. Throughout his life, Mazur addressed the individual human condition as well as society’s role in exploitative policies and systems of confinement. The work demands of himself and viewers recognition of the abused and forgotten. The American Way Room (1968), a wall and floor installation in an empty storefront where viewers walked over images of victims of the Vietnam war, brought his anti-war position to public spaces. His monotype collaboration, with poet laureate Robert Pinsky, of Dante’s Inferno confronts states of relentless anguish. In a 1993 interview with the Archives of American Art, Mazur said “I decided to do some work on the monkey cages at Stoneham Zoo, which were very depressed and reminded me of the mental hospital. It was a strange return to the hospital work via the world of animals.” His mastery of pastel is essential to the Stoneham Zoo pieces. The medium provided him with a way to combine elements of drawing and painting. Pastel’s directness of touch gives a visceral feeling of movement. The primates are on edge, yet in stasis. Tangible despair and the inhumane nature of zoos are conveyed in these portraits of the primates in their looming, barren cages. Light and shadow capture the dualities of passivity and tension within the images. A psychological intensity is heightened by Mazur’s extreme color choices.