Rita Gombinski Art

Rita Gombinski (Jewish American woman artist) grew up in the Bronx and can still vividly recall her first recognized work: a painting of a cat done in elementary school. In her senior year in high school, she jokes, she received her first official critique after sending an article and illustration from the high school paper to famed New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott, whose yellowing note card she keeps in a journal: Rita Gombinski, who owned the Gombinski Gallery with her husband, Mendel, at 900 Lincoln Rd. in Miami Beach, for a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, and two other galleries in New York and Israel, is now the artist-in-residence at the Miami Jewish Home, a title she announces sheepishly. "I donated so much of my art that I have been called the artist-in-residence here," she says of approximately 150 paintings she gave to the home.Her studio, now an apartment in the Irving Cypen Tower at the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, nearly brims with works -- in closets, leaning against walls and stacked in boxes. Some date to just months ago. Some are seven decades old. There is one large collage that was completed during the fall of Saigon. On a dresser is a portrait of a young Gombinski and her second husband as newlyweds, done in her intricate abstract style. Works in progress are spread across an old dining room table, now used as a kind of easel. Her work frequently has Jewish or Hebrew motifs, a menorah with a judaic star, Judaica, a mezuzah or megillah scroll by this talented Jewish woman...

This is a proof print and is unsigned. it has Jewish Hebraic motifs, a menorah with a Jewish star, a mezusah or megilla scroll by this talented Jewish woman artist. Her whole life long, through the births of two children, the deaths of two husbands, three wars and across two continents, Rita Gombinksi has painted. Her studio, now an apartment in the Irving Cypen Tower at the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, nearly brims with works -- in closets, leaning against walls and stacked in boxes. Some date to just months ago. Some are seven decades old. There is one large collage that was completed during the fall of Saigon. On a dresser is a portrait of a young Gombinski and her second husband as newlyweds, done in her intricate abstract style. Works in progress are spread across an old dining room...

Her whole life long, through the births of two children, the deaths of two husbands, three wars and across two continents, Rita Gombinksi has painted. Her studio, now an apartment in the Irving Cypen Tower at the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, nearly brims with works -- in closets, leaning against walls and stacked in boxes. Some date to just months ago. Some are seven decades old. There is one large collage that was completed during the fall of Saigon. On a dresser is a portrait of a young Gombinski and her second husband as newlyweds, done in her intricate abstract style. Works in progress are spread across an old dining room table...