Marylyn Dintenfass
Encyclopedia
Marylyn Dintenfass 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.
, 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. During this time, the artist worked with Abstract Expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. 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.
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.
(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.”
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 Financial Building; Ben Gurion University, Israel; Tagimi Middle School, Japan; and her 2010 project (and largest project to date) in Ft Myers, Florida entitled “Parallel Park.”
"Parallel Park" is a site-specific artwork for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center's Parking Garage encompassing 30000 square feet (2,787.1 m²). Dintenfass’s images were enlarged to 10 times their original size employing specialized digitizing software resulting in 23 images, each 33 feet (10.1 m) high x 23 feet (7 m) wide and commercially printed with archival ink on Kevlar 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
.
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 Arts
, the Cleveland Museum, The Detroit Institute of Arts
, 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.
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, 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.
Early Life & Influences
Marylyn Dintenfass was born in 1943 in BrooklynBrooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
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. During this time, the artist worked with Abstract Expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. Dintenfass explored new media and developed her own reaction to abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
with color
Color
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
, line, and gesture
Gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of speech or together and in parallel with spoken words. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or other parts of the body...
. Dintenfass acquired an appreciation for a broad range of materials that led to major sculpture installations composed of ceramic
Ceramic
A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may be amorphous...
materials, steel
Steel
Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...
, lead
Lead
Lead is a main-group element in the carbon group with the symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed...
, 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.
Paintings
Art critic Meredith Mendelsohn writes, “Dintenfass uses luscious colors, repetitive forms, and a gestural intensity that combines Abstract ExpressionismAbstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
and Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine 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
Micro
Micro is a prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10-6 . Confirmed in 1960, the prefix comes from the Greek , meaning "small".The symbol for the prefix is the Greek letter μ...
” and the “macro
Macro
A macro in computer science is a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence should be mapped to an output sequence according to a defined procedure...
.” 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.
Sculptural Installations
Although known for her paintings, Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural installations. Her innovative use of mixed mediaMixed media
Mixed media, in visual art, refers to an artwork in the making of which more than one medium has been employed.There is an important distinction between "mixed-media" artworks and "multimedia art". Mixed media tends to refer to a work of visual art that combines various traditionally distinct...
(ceramics, epoxies, wax, pigments, steel, lead, wood, etc.) transformed understanding of what a “ceramic
Ceramic
A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may be amorphous...
” 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
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
. 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.”
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 Financial Building; Ben Gurion University, Israel; Tagimi Middle School, Japan; and her 2010 project (and largest project to date) in Ft Myers, Florida entitled “Parallel Park.”
"Parallel Park" is a site-specific artwork for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center's Parking Garage encompassing 30000 square feet (2,787.1 m²). Dintenfass’s images were enlarged to 10 times their original size employing specialized digitizing software resulting in 23 images, each 33 feet (10.1 m) high x 23 feet (7 m) wide and commercially printed with archival ink on Kevlar 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
Futurists
Futurists or futurologists are scientists and social scientists whose speciality is to attempt to systematically predict the future, whether that of human society in particular or of life on earth in general....
.
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 ArtQueens Museum of Art
The Queens Museum of Art is an art museum and educational center located in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in the borough of Queens in New York City, United States.-Overview:...
the Katonah Museum, The Greenville County Museum of Art
Greenville County Museum of Art
The Greenville County Museum of Art is an art museum located in Greenville, South Carolina. Its collections focus mainly on American art, and its holdings include works by Andrew Wyeth, Josef Albers, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Ronnie Landfield, Eric Fischl, Marylyn...
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 Arts
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a fine art museum located in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a campus that covers nearly 8 acres , formerly Morrison Park...
, the Cleveland Museum, The Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit Institute of Arts
The Detroit Institute of Arts is a renowned art museum in the city of Detroit. In 2003, the DIA ranked as the second largest municipally owned museum in the United States, with an art collection valued at more than one billion dollars...
, the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...
, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
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.