Bernece Berkman-Hunter

American Artist Abstract Painting

Provenance: Babcock Galleries (bears their label verso.) signed verso with artists monogram signature. Marylyn Dintenfass (born 1943) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is primarily known for her oil paintings, which use a dynamic color palette and lexicon of gestural imagery to explore dualities in the human experience and everyday sensual pleasures. Marylyn Dintenfass was born in 1943 in Brooklyn, New York and spent most of her early years in Brooklyn and then Long Island. She attended Queens College, and graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. During this time, the artist worked with Abstract Expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. Marilyn Dintenfass explored new media and developed her own reaction to abstract expressionism with color, line, and gesture. Dintenfass acquired an appreciation for a broad range of materials that led to major sculpture installations composed of ceramic materials, steel, lead, wood, wax and a variety of pigments and epoxies. Following a tour of museums in Amsterdam, Paris and Rome, the artist made her way to Jerusalem in 1966. During this journey, the artist worked with painter Ruth Bamberger, studied etching and mingled with the artists and intellectuals of the city. The result was Dintenfass's first architectural commission, to design the “Pop Op Disco,” Jerusalem's first disco. This commission allowed her to work with an array of materials to employ shapes, surfaces, textures, colors, and lights, all of which coalesced in her consciousness that would become important components of her mature personal visual vocabulary. Dintenfass also married and started her family during these years. Art critic Meredith Mendelsohn writes, “Dintenfass uses luscious colors, repetitive forms, and a gestural intensity that combines Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.” Dintenfass often works with oil paint on wooden panels fragmented into parts of a grid. "After completing a painting," writes curator and critic Lilly Wei in a study of Dintenfass' work, "Dintenfass literally takes it apart, treating each panel as a discrete entity, exchanging panels between works in an aesthetic mix and match as she searches for interactions and relationships of color and form that satisfy her sense of visual excitement, sparked by the frisson of the dissonant." In an interview with critic Irving Sandler, Dintenfass speaks of the grid as a necessary, formal restraint for the passion of the gestural marks it contains. Joyce Robinson illuminates; “Dintenfass is at heart, though, a painter, and the grid, with its reference to and notion of modular parts, has remained central to her artistic enterprise, functioning as a kind of Apollonian matrix holding in check the exuberant, vividly colored abstractions of this essentially Dionysian artist.” Lilly Wei adds, "Ultimately, however, Dintenfass is more sensualist than theorist, and her paintings owe much of their allure to their materiality and the dazzle of color. Her array of ripe, radiant, saturated hues—a palette of gorgeous diversity—can be silkily smooth and nuanced; boldly exuberant; or edgily, feverishly discordant." The artist's abstract imagery usually appears in her work as various forms of stripes or circles arranged across translucent layers of alternating matte and high gloss textures. In a conversation with gallery owner, John Driscoll, Dintenfass likens these symbols to language that predates the written word, saying her "work relates to communication through the visceral channel." Rooted in autobiography, the artist's paintings also examine the contrast between what she calls the “micro” and the “macro.” At times the shapes simultaneously resemble cells under a microscope and visions of the cosmos. Dintenfass' themes explore the dualities of everyday pleasures; depending on the focus of a series, her symbols might conjure characters, candies, car wheels, or paint itself. Although known for her paintings, Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural installations. Her innovative use of mixed media (ceramics, epoxies, wax, pigments, steel, lead, wood, etc.) transformed understanding of what a “ceramic” work of art could be and firmly fixed her position and influence among a generation of mixed media artists expanding the traditional definitions and boundaries of object and materials to create modern art. The results came as architectural reliefs and installation sculpture unique to her organic but structural personal style. Similar to her paintings, Dintenfass developed a modular language of symbols, amalgams of line and curve, which she would combine to create detailed pictographic languages all her own, what she has called “organic alphabets.” As Ted Castle relates, “Ideas are furtive elements, stolen from the matrix, so as to be reformed by human genius into something unforeseen—a poem, a painting, a game of dominoes, a television set, a brick, a tile, a cup. Marylyn Dintenfass is a master of the transformation of ideas into palpable form.” Dintenfass has also been commissioned to create many large-scale installations, including works for the State of Connecticut Superior Courthouse; the Port Authority of NY 42nd Street Bus Terminal; IBM in Atlanta, Charlotte, and San Jose; The Baltimore Federal...

Ces McCully, Australian, b. 1982 Untitled (Altar), 2021 Signed and dated CES '21 on the reverse Oil on canvas 39 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches (100.3 x 80 cm) Unframed Ces McCully (born 1982, Melbourne, Australia) Now based in Southern France, Ces McCully is a contemporary Australian artist, whose work is collected and shown internationally. ​ Rachael McCully's oeuvre includes text based pieces which utilize chance in color relationships, and abstract geometric paintings which often have a meditative effect; both sharing autobiographical elements with a reflection on society, and a minimalist approach. "I dabbled in painting, photography, writing and design over the years," before settling more firmly on painting. Feminist icons Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger were amongst her inspirations as she began studying art. However now Rachael McCully-Kerwick is forging her own visual language in the south of France. Ces McCully explores themes of female relationships and identity through minimalistic forms, geometric compositions and repeated tribal motifs. Her work, which moves between text pieces and abstract painting, is collected and shown internationally. In McCully’s typography works, she uses vivid colours to create stylised and geometric typographical pieces, divulging secret, and often brutally honest thoughts. Muted-color, cloth-like ‘Patchwork’; geometric and linear works including ‘Mono’ and ‘Shape’; and three-dimensional Cubes with bold colors which brighten up the space. More recently however, we have seen McCully embrace the folk art like characteristics of her work, incorporating religious iconography and human figures into her paintings. Her works are held in private collections internationally and has been shown within Europe and Australia. Mccully has had her work on display in the Louis Vuitton flagship store, Sydney CBD. SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2022 More Than This, Breach, Miami, USA 2021 Strange Like Me, PIERMARQ*, Sydney, Australia 2019 A Cure for Melancholy, Galerie 42B, France 2017 Beyond the Blablabla Sky, Galerie Rompone, Germany SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2022 PINK, PIERMARQ*, Sydney, Australia (with new work by Maximilian Daniels, Gabriele Herzog, Ces McCully, Galina Munroe, Rob Tucker, Andrew Salgado and Spencer Shakespeare). 2019 Bluerider Art Gallery, Taiwan Delphian X Guts Gallery, London, UK (Douglas Cantor, Florence Hutchings, Geoffrey Bohm, Igor Moritz...

Richard Snyder (American, born 1951) Untitled Mixed media painting including charcoal and watercolor Hand signed to lower right Dimensions: 30.0" W x 22.5" H x 0.1" D Richard Snyder is particularly known for his large-scale abstract expressionist paintings exhibiting vibrant colors, often applied in an irregular manner with large gestural brushstrokes. He also was an accomplished sculptor and was amongst the downtown New York art-furniture scene spawned in the 1980s by the Soho gallery ‘Art et Industrie’ founded by Rick Kaufmann. Downtown New York, circa 1977-1980 was a hothouse of creative impulses that flew in the face of restrictions and ran headlong toward riotous expression. Punk, hip-hop, graffiti or neo-expressionism, Kaufmann looked around for new talent that could create a new kind of art furniture. He felt the design of the day was so standardised, and he wanted to give voice to young artists and bring new ideas to market. After receiving a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Snyder made his career in the fields of art and design, practicing sculpture, painting, furniture design and fabrication, interior design, cabinetmaking, construction and industrial design. Along with extensive experience in a wide variety of materials and processes, Snyder also possesses a wide range of visual and experiential vocabulary acquired in his many travels through the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Central and Southeast Asia. Snyder considers his objects to be not just about form, function, color, material and process, but rather to be fantasies with spirit, magic and story. During his seventeen years with the Art et Industrie gallery, Snyder participated in five solo shows and more than twenty group shows, which established him as a major player in the American Art Furniture movement. His pieces have appeared in numerous publications and media around the world; and they are included in numerous private collections worldwide as well as in the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. Snyder guest-lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, the New School in New York, and SUNY Purchase. He was included in the seminal Magen H Gallery retrospective of Art et Industrie—a New York Movement. Art et Industrie was the first to exhibit Studio Alchemia, Shiro Takahama, and Ron Arad. The retrospective included artists such as Forrest Myers, Terence Main...

SIBYL EDWARDS (Canadian b. 1944) "Rainbow Egg Tray" 1973 Watercolor on Pressed Pulp Cardboard Egg Tray Filler Hand signed and dated verso in ink, "Sibyl Edwards, 1973." Dimensions: 12" x 12" Provenance: Collection of Roy H. Van Horn, Houston, Texas Sibyl Edwards was born in Canada, she was a Texas artist who taught at the Dallas museum of Art in the 1940's along with well-known Dallas artists including Octavio Medellin, Otis Dozier, Merritt Mauzey, and Roger Winter. She was also a avid collector. Her collection included works by Max Bill, Herbert Distel, Hansjorg Glattfelder, the Belgian sculptor Paul Van Hoeydonck...

Kurt Herrmann’s paintings explore his fascination with the language of color and the power it evokes universally and subjectively. To Herrmann, it is not necessarily about the color,...

Original artwork, acrylic paints on canvas by Joseph Gilgun With a mixture of street, abstract and fine art influences, most of Joe's work is created using a blend of acrylics, spra...

Signed lower right, "Mogens Valeur" (Danish, 1927-1999) and dated 1956. Mogens Valeur first studied with Peter Rostrup Boyesen, and later attended the Copenhagen Art Academy. He sub...

Frank Shifreen Plates, Moons, Planets, Stars 2021 18 x 24 inches Acrylic on Canvas Signed, titled and dated on verso These new works start from polar opposite impulses which juxtap...