Lot 233
Nancy Grossman
New York, (b. 1940)
Untitled, 1965
ink on paper
Signed and dated lower right.
Biography from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery: Born in New York City to parents who worked in the garment industry, Nancy Grossman grew up on a working farm in Oneonta, New York. These early experiences shaped her artistic vision and influenced her choice of materials, which frequently include fabric and leather. After high school, Grossman matriculated at the Pratt Institute, where she studied with Richard Linder, and in 1962, she received her BFA and an Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel. This grant was just the first of numerous such honors; in 1965, just three years after finishing college, Grossman received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Grossman became famous in the 1960s for her sculptures of heads that she carefully carved from the hard wood of discarded telephone poles, overlaid with leather, and then adorned with zippers, glass eyes, enamel noses, spikes, and straps. While their size, shape, and facial features suggest masculinity, Grossman refers to them as self-portraits, implying the instability of gender identity and, just as importantly, demonstrating how all artwork offers something of the artist. The heads threaten to overshadow the rest of Grossman's art, largely due to sensationalistic interpretations that tend to see the sculptures exclusively in a sadomasochistic frame. However, these works exquisitely contain central aspects of Grossman's art: an embrace of gender ambiguity, an interest in formal contradiction and conflict, an audacious use of leather, and a rich sensuality. Grossman's sculptures appeal as much to the olfactory and tactile senses as to the visual; they taunt the viewer with their invitation to touch.
Despite Grossman's notoriety and visibility in the 1960s—she had had five solo exhibitions by age thirty in 1970—most audiences failed to grasp the scope of her work until a retrospective organized by the Hillwood Art Museum revealed her mastery of diverse media and genres. Since she began making art in the 1950s, Grossman has steadily explored collage, sculpture, and assemblage. Much of her work concerns the physicality of the body, but works on paper like Tough Life Diary (1973) consist of collaged words and fragments, scraps taken from her journals and placed into compositions that blend the chaotic elements of chance with the labor-intensive, organizing hand of the artist. In 1999, Grossman was forced to leave her studio on Chinatown's Eldridge Street that she had occupied for thirty-five years, and she relocated to her current home of Brooklyn. Her work also struck out in new directions with a group of sculptural assemblages that seem to echo the archaeology and violence involved in the upheaval of her move.
Throughout her impressive career, Grossman has received a steady flow of accolades, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1991), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1996-97), and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2001). She is represented in numerous museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
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Dimensions:
- 16 1/4"H x 13 1/4"W(sight), 20 1/2"H x 17 1/2"W(frame) Artist Name:
- Nancy Grossman Medium:
- ink on paper
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