Lot 223
Nancy Grossman
American, (b.1940)
untitled, 1979-81
collage on paper
signed lower right.
Biography from The Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia
Born in New York City in 1940, Nancy Grossman spent her earliest years in an upstate New York farmhouse in Oneonta, surrounded by an extended family of eight adults and sixteen children. (1) Her parents had roots in the garment business; at the age of sixteen, Grossman worked as a "dart and gusset girl" in their dress factory. Soon after, she escaped the farm and returned to New York to study art. Her acquired skills in patterning, sewing, and piecing became the medium for her message.
Consequently, from the start, she was exposed to many complex human interactions. As the artist has discussed many times elsewhere, many of these interactions were hurtful. She was chastised often for her nonconformity. At eighteen, Grossman decided to become an artist and entered Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. A scholarship enabled her to remain there, and later she received a grant to study in Europe. While in Venice, she chanced upon a museum that boasted a collection of Samurai armor. The imaginative body coverings on exhibit intrigued Grossman. From these, perhaps, came the inspiration for her leather-covered head series of sculptures begun in the late sixties in the Viet Nam era. These heads were first images drawn on paper. She was appalled at the images that were beginning to emerge and hid them for over a year.
One might say that integrity has been the cornerstone in Grossman's career, as she has moved from painting to collage, between assemblage and relief sculpture, and finally, by 1968, to the heads. (2)
Her first important exhibition was at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in 1969, and consisted mainly of the rancorous-looking carved heads wrapped in black leather. They are fully carved to exacting detail and then meticulously covered in the stitched and metal-studded leather covering. They are frequently adorned with horns, chains, zippers, spikes or other objects that have loaded psychological and sexual meanings in our society. To see one of her life-size heads, bound in black leather, zippered-up, with protruding features and gnarled teeth, all exquisitely carved and crafted…is to feel an inner sense of being that goes far beyond the mundane world of external events.
Grossman is engaged in the pursuit of her own inner-directed motif, her own concept of the human condition that pulls us back to the sobriety of another emotional reality. (3)
Grossman taught sculpture at the Boston Fine Arts School in 1985, and drawing at Cooper Union, New York City in 1989. She has received many honors including the Guggenheim Foundations fellowship (1965) and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award (1985), and a National Endowment for the Arts sculpture award (1991).
A serious metacarpal impairment was diagnosed in 1995 that caused a crippling effect and prevented her from working for almost a year. A car accident in 1998 caused even further setbacks in her ability to work. These physical limitations have made it nearly impossible for her to carve the wooden forms that form the basis for the heads, and have caused her to work more with collage and assemblage. This recent direction is more in a Neo-Dada spirit and is where she began her career in the early 1960s. (4)
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Dimensions:
- 15"H x 21 1/2"W (sight), 23"H x 30"W (frame) Artist Name:
- Nancy Grossman Medium:
- collage on paper
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