Marylyn Dintenfass

Marylyn Dintenfass[1] is an American painter who 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 Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts.

In Manhattan, Dintenfass followed closely the gallery movements of the time; among these she attended exhibitions at the Allan Stone Gallery, and became acquainted with Sidney Janis, closely following the exhibitions at his gallery, as well as those at America House and the Museum of Modern Art. The artistic deluge of the New York art scene during this period provided a provocative foundation for Dintenfass’s early studies. During this time, the artist worked with Abstract Expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. Simultaneously, Dintenfass related to contemporary artists, including Eva Hesse, Frank Stella, Richard Diebenkorn, Donald Lipski, and Larry Poons, 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.

Work

Dintenfass’s oeuvre has often been a catalyst for critical response. The artist is often said to have bridged the gap between an exploration of abstraction and a profound understanding of expression, creating a completely new hybrid of the two movements and disintegrating their well-established polarity. Her “biomorphic” gestural creations and “mysterious pictographic languages” have developed for years in her paintings and propelled her into a unique realm between the figurative and the anti-figurative body of art theory. As Meredith Mendelsohn writes, “Dintenfass uses luscious colors, repetitive forms, and a gestural intensity that combines Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.” The oscillation in and out of minimalism and expressionism, and in and out of order and chaos, demonstrates the artist’s “formal” restraint and “passionate” freedom seated in personal and emotional narrative. As curator and critic Lily Wei asserts; “Dintenfass, as is obvious from her paintings, is also on the side of visual pleasure, a believer in contemporary beauty. Lush but also astringent, with a glittered coolness and reserve that offsets its heat, her work offers a bracing example of an experiential painting for the present. ” The artist’s paintings also examine the contrast between what she calls the “micro” and the “macro.” As 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. ” This seems to also relate to the artist’ s eccentric use of oil paints, creating glazy washes not usually characteristic to their traditional thick impasto.

Although known primarily for her paintings Dintenfass is also well known 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 sculptures 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. ” Her graceful balance between line and curve, grid and wave, and square and circle has hence shown itself through all of her mediums and remains today her artistic vision.

Dintenfass has also been honored with many large-scale installation commissions: works include installations accomplished 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 Financial Building, Ben Gurion University Israel, Tagimi Middle School Japan and her 2010 project (and largest project to date) for the Lee County Justice Center in Ft Myers, Florida entitled “Parallel Park.”[2] The project in Ft Myers is a site-specific artwork for the building’s exterior walls encompassing 30,000 square feet (2,800 m²). Dintenfass’s images were enlarged to 10 times their original size employing specialized digitizing software resulting in 23 images each 33 feet (10 m) high x 23 feet (7.0 m) wide and commercially printed with archival ink on a fiberglass fabric and installed on all four facades of the parking structure. Each panel transforms the perimeter of the structure, creating a progression of changing images and colorful patterns, all of which are key elements represented in Dintenfass’s paintings and drawings. These images and patterns recall architectural friezes, mosaics, and frescoes of the ancient, medieval and Renaissance artists as well as works by early modern artists such as the Synchromists and the Italian Futurists.

Exhibitions

Dintenfass’ work has been included in more than 60 national and international exhibitions and more than a dozen solo shows including the Queens Museum of Art the Katonah Museum, The Greenville County Museum of Art and, at the Mississippi Museum of Art –an exhibition underwritten by the Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2008, her work was included in the Inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

More than 30 public collections hold works by Dintenfass, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Cleveland Museum, The Detroit Institute of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Dintenfass has twice been a MacDowell Fellow, was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artists Grant, and two National Endowment Project Grants. She was awarded the Silver Medal at the First International Exhibition, Mino, Japan, and the Ravenna Prize at the 45th Concorso Internazionale Della Ceramica D’Arte, Faenza, Italy. She was also a member of the faculty at Parsons School of Design in New York City for ten years. She is included in the recent book 100 New York Painters by Cynthia Maris Dantzig (Schiffer, 2006) and is the subject of Lilly Wei’s recently published monograph Marylyn Dintenfass Paintings from Hudson Hills Press[3].