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.
