Alan Tompkins

Things of this World, Abstract Oil Painting

Abstract watercolor composition bearing the influence of the earlier color-block compositions of Paul Klee. Pawel August Kontny, (Polish-German-American artist) He was born in Laurahuette, Poland, in 1923, the son of a wealthy pastry shop owner. In 1939 he began studying architecture in Breslau where he was introduced to the European masters and to the work of some of the German Expressionists, soon afterward banned as "degenerate artists" and removed from museums throughout Germany by the Nazi regime. His studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, traveling in many countries as a soldier, he sketched various landscapes but in 1945, he was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he studied at the Union of Nuremberg Architects to help design buildings to replace ones destroyed in the war. He recorded his impressions of the local population and the landscapes through his watercolors and drawings. Pawel Kontny thereafter moved to Nuremberg, Germany, becoming a member of the Union of Nuremberg Architects and helping to rebuild the city's historic center. He soon decided to concentrate on his professional art career. He married Irmgard Laurer, a dancer with the Nuremberg Opera. Pavel Kontny 's career as an artist was launched with his participation in an all German exhibition, held at the Dusseldorf Museum in 1952. He held one-man shows in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. During his trip to the United States in 1960, Kontny became instantly enamored with Colorado, and decided to relocate to Cherry Hills with his wife and two children. He quickly established himself in the local art community, being affiliated for a time with Denver Art Galleries and Saks Galleries. His subject matter became the Southwest. During this time he received the Prestigious Gold Medal of the Art Academy of Rome. His extensive travel provided material for the paintings he did using his hallmark marble dust technique. he also worked equally in pastel, watercolor, charcoal and pencil-and-ink. in a style which merged abstraction and realist styles, influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and South Western American landscapes. In the early 1960s he was one of only a few European-born professional artists in the state, a select group that included Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), a member of the prewar Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, and Roland Detre (1903-2001), a Hungarian modernist painter. As a Denver, Colorado resident, Pavel Kontny exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the United States, Germany and Japan. There, he was inspired by frequent trips to Native American pueblos in the Southwest, as well as by the study of the Plains Indians of Montana and Wyoming. Over the years Kontny had a number of students and generously helped young artist by hosting exhibitions at his Cherry Hills home. For many years he generously donated his paintings to support charitable causes in Denver. Influences during his European years included German pastelist C.O. Muller, German Informel painter Karl Dahmen and Swiss artist, Hans Erni. In the early 1950s his painting style showed the influence of the Die Brücke (The Bridge), a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905 who had a major impact on the evolution of modern art in the twentieth century in Germany. By the middle of the decade his style incorporated more referential abstraction and total abstraction, resulting in part from his study of Hans Hartung, a German artist based in Paris who exhibited his gestural abstract work in Germany. The American moon landing in 1969 inspired Paul Kontny...

Joseph Wolins 1915-1999 Subject: Jewish, Dancing with the Torah (New Torah, Simchat Torah) Hand signed oil painting In this painting, Joseph Wolins uses vibrant and complimentary co...

Hea-Sook Yoo, artist, internationally renowned, has her paintings hanging in residences, businesses and art galleries on three continents over three decades.Ms. Yoo is classically tr...

"Dusseldorf, Germany" 1993, oil on canvas, hand signed and dated lower left, Canvas (unframed):18 X 48. framed: 19.5 X 49.5 Provenance: directly from the artist. Exhibited at Phyllis Kind Gallery in NYC in 1987. Archie Rand (American, born 1949) is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His graphic works and books are held by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute Of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins universities. Born in Brooklyn, Rand received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College which granted him the Award for Excellence in Creative Achievement in 2016. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University. In 2002 he became the artistic advisor to film director Ang Lee for his production of The Hulk, and was asked by Milestone Films to provide a commentary track for the DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic 1955 film The Mystery of Picasso. Archie Rand’s earliest major works are “The Letter Paintings” (or “The Jazz Paintings”) (1968–71), a radically positioned series of technically inventive, mural-sized canvases. The Letter Paintings, by incorporating the names of mainly male and female African-American musicians, undermined prevailing aesthetic categories by conflating many contemporary movements including Conceptual Art, Color Field, Pattern and Decoration, diary entry and social commentary. In 1974 Rand received a commission from Congregation B’nai Yosef in Brooklyn. Rand was asked to paint thematic murals on the complete 16,000-square-foot (1,500 m2) interior surfaces of the synagogue. The work took three years, and completing this commission made Rand the author of the only narratively painted synagogue in the world and the only one we know of since the 2nd Century Dura-Europos. The religious legal controversy raised by placing wall paintings in a traditionally iconoclastic space was resolved by the verdict of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, then considered to be the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, who declared the paintings to be in conformity with the law. His subsequent turn to figuration may have been influenced by his friendship with Philip Guston, whose own work was transformed in the late 1960s. Like Guston, Rand "chafed at the limitations of purely abstract forms." A near-cult figure who started out as a child prodigy and whose admirers range from John Ashbery to Julian Schnabel. Rand’s paintings display a vast and savvy menu of inventive and finely executed approaches. He has completed many series after the works of Paul Celan, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Eugenio Montale, Yehuda Amichai, Rainer Maria Rilke, Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard and Jack Spicer. Working often with poets, he has produced books and continues to engage in publishing collaborative projects. He maintained a correspondence with the American British Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj. In 2008, on a warehouse wall, Rand mounted the painting, “The 613”, which at 1700 square feet (17’ x 100’) is nearly twice the size of James Rosenquist’s F-111. It is one of the largest freestanding paintings ever made. Reminiscent of “The Segments” paintings it is intimidatingly enormous. Paradoxically, despite the raucous cartoony bytes that shoot colorful flashes from the manic surface, “The 613” glows warmly. Its overall effect is strangely calming and majestic. In an article on a 2011 exhibition of Rand's "Had Gadya" series, David Kaufmann wrote: Rand displayed his work in 15 solo exhibitions between 2008 and 2017, many of them showcasing paintings done after Scripture, or his workings with poets: Including “Had Gadya, 2005”, Borowsky Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2011); “Gods Change, Prayers Are Here To Stay (after Yehuda Amichai), 2000", Katz Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2014); “Psalm 68, 1994”, Derfner Museum, Riverdale, NY (2014); “The Chapter Paintings”, Tribeca Gallery, NY (2015); “Men Who Turn Back (after Eugenio Montale), 1995", SRO Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016); “Sixty Paintings From the Bible” & “The Book of Judith, 2012”, Cleveland State University Galleries, Cleveland, OH (2016) & The American Jewish Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2017); “Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry: Jack Spicer, 1991 and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard, 1993”, St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY (2017). "The 613" In 2015 Blue Rider/Penguin/Random House published The 613, allotting one color plate per page for each of the 614 units in the painting. The Wall Street Journal labeled The 613 as “dynamic…remarkable…thrilling” The New York Times selected the book as “Editors' Choice” and praised it in two separate reviews calling it “wonderfully garish” and declaring that “nothing prepared the art world for 'The 613.' Recent Activity In 2016 Rand showed two bodies of work that were done in Italy, “La Certosa Di Pontignano, 1995” and “Mount Etna, 2005,” at The Interchurch Center Galleries, New York. From 2016 to 2017 he served as the Curator and Juror for the Governor of Wyoming’s Capitol Arts Exhibition at The Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne, WY. A 2017 exhibition, “Archie Rand: Early Works With Poetry”, featured two series of work from 1991 and 1993 after poems by Jack Spicer and Samuel Beckett/Paul Eluard. This painting was exhibited in the Phyllis Kind Gallery in NY in 1987. (Phyllis Kind was an American art dealer active in Chicago and New York. She promoted the work of the Chicago Imagists, The Monster Roster and The Hairy Who and outsider artists. Kind opened a gallery in Chicago in 1967. Called Pro Grafica Arte, the gallery dealt in master prints and drawings. In 1975, she opened a gallery on Spring Street in New York's SoHo district. She gave some of the artists in the movement their first solo shows: Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson...

"Florentine Expressions: A Portrait Series III", oil on canvas, mounted on board, Florentine School (circa 1980s-90s). This gallery has acquired a number of paintings through an inte...

"Florentine Expressions: A Portrait Series VII", oil on canvas, mounted on board, Florentine School (circa 1980s-90s). This gallery has acquired a number of paintings through an inte...

"Florentine Expressions: A Portrait Series II", oil on canvas, mounted on board, Florentine School (circa 1980s-90s). This gallery has acquired a number of paintings through an inter...

"Florentine Expressions: A Portrait Series IV", oil on canvas, mounted on board, Florentine School (circa 1980s-90s). This gallery has acquired a number of paintings through an inter...