Barbara Lynch Zinkel

Homage to the Square (Summer), Geometric Screenprint by Barbara Lynch Zinkel

1987

It’s not surprising that Barbara Lynch Zinkel was a textile artist before moving on to printmaking, working out ideas of composition and color in weavings. Her geometric forms often have a very tactile presence that lifts them off the page, despite their graphic flatness.

After earning a BA in political science at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s, the American artist studied at Wayne State University, in Detroit, with Robert Kidd, who had been head of fiber arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the legendary Bloomfield Hills institution that became the go-to art school for mid-century modernist masters such as Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia and Florence Knoll.

Zinkel was deeply fixated on color, playing different hues off one another for a variety of dramatic effects. A 1994 silkscreen titled Burgundy Blue is one of several directly inspired by German-born color theorist — and Bauhaus educator — Josef Albers’s legendary “Homage to the Square,” a series of paintings begun in 1950 that investigate the perceptual mutations produced when colors are juxtaposed in nested squares.

But Zinkel reveals much more of her hand in her slightly imperfect geometric forms and staggered edges. The effect is refreshingly lively and personal.

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