Howard Kanovitz

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Howard Kanovitz (born February 9, 1929 in Fall River , Massachusetts , † February 3, 2009 in New York City ) was an American painter and printmaker.

Life

The son of Lithuanian immigrants who fled the Jewish pogroms , studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1945 to 1951 . He then rented a studio in New York so that he could paint during the day. In the evenings he played the trombone in bars. In his 1956 oil painting Four AM Eastern Standard Time , he portrayed himself as a jazz trombonist. He met other young painters as well as the Abstract Expressionists that were currently popular and became an assistant to Franz Kline . He lived with his wife from the region in the artists' colony in the Hamptons in a house they had designed by the sea. His first solo exhibition took place in New York in 1962. In 1969, some of his pictures were on view at the Museum Ludwig as part of the Art of the 60’s exhibition. He participated in Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 6 (1977) in Kassel . In 1974 the Lehmbruck Museum and 1979 the Berlin Academy of the Arts dedicated solo exhibitions to him . From 1981 to 1985 he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

style

In the 1950s, Kanovitz's paintings belonged to Abstract Expressionism. After a few trips to Europe, he changed to a representational painter, and since 1963 Kanovitz has been one of the most important representatives of photorealism . Initially, his collage technique consisted of reassembling existing photos in his paintings in a different form. He later changed this technique by spatially separating individual components of his compositions from the pictures. One of his most famous works is the picture “Exhibition Opening”, which can be seen in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In the 1970s Kanovitz created numerous pictures in which he made the situation of the photographer in the studio the subject. While his pictures were painted with airbrush technique and stencils at the beginning of the 1970s to enhance the photographic effect, Kanovitz turned to pastel painting again at the end of the 1970s . The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote in 1979 that Kanovitz offered "[always] new surprising confrontations, amazing alienation effects" and had "many other ironic tricks". “He collages (painterly, graphically)”, it goes on there, “excerpts of reality, and he decollages them, tears them out of familiar contexts, isolates them. He interweaves, combines different levels, spaces, perspectives. He works with cuts, cracks, reflections, fades in and out, overlaps. ”A new dimension opened up for the Berliner Morgenpost :“ Of course, Kanovitz's best pictures don't just copy reality. They put it into perspective, give it the filter of another dimension [...]. ”In 1981, the art magazine art characterized his works as“ oscillating between Pop Art and elegant realism ”.

Exhibitions

literature

  • Hajo Düchting In: Harenberg painter lexicon. 1000 artist biographies from seven centuries. Harenberg Lexikon Verlag, Dortmund 2001, ISBN 3-611-00977-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Werner Rhode: Tricks of a player and doubter. Howard Kanovitz retrospective at the West Berlin Academy of the Arts . In: Frankfurter Rundschau . 20th September 1979.
  2. ↑ a b Peter Hans Göpfert: Painted Irritations. To the big Kanovitz retrospective at the Academy of Arts . In: Berliner Morgenpost . 7th September 1979.
  3. ↑ Andreas Kaps: Reality in slices. Howard Kanovitz - retrospective at the Academy of Arts . In: tip . No. 19/79 , September 14, 1979, exhibitions, p. 40-41 .
  4. ↑ a b Gabriele von Arnim: Long Island. Where New York's painter princes live . In: Art . The art magazine. January 1981, Art Today, p. 20-39 .
personal data
SURNAME Kanovitz, Howard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and printmaker
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Fall River , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 2009
Place of death New York City