Chelsea, New York
Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman
Collage in Dialogue
Michael Rosenfeld"Collage comes the closest to reality. It is the only way to make the disparate and ill-fitting parts of a life, an identity, an elegantly seamless experience. It satisfies both the urgent and the substantive thirst." [1] —Nancy Grossman "I feel that when some photographic detail, such as a hand or an eye, is taken out of its original context and is fractured and integrated into a different space and form configuration, it acquires a plastic quality it did not have in the original photograph…Art, it must be remembered, is artifice, or a creative undertaking, the primary function of which is to add to our existing conception of reality." [2] —Romare Bearden Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman: Collage in Dialogue, an exhibition focused on the artistic exchange between two leading innovators of the medium. Though Bearden was a generation older than Grossman, the artists initiated their collage practices within a year of each other—Grossman in 1962 and Bearden in 1963—and shared crucial developments in their technique through a continuous dialogue. Brought together through the cultural milieu fostered by their dealer at the time, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, the two artists remained close friends until Bearden's death, forging a vital rapport that shaped their practices and lives. The works presented in Romare Bearden & Nancy Grossman: Collage in Dialogue reveal surprising alignments between the artists’ collage oeuvres despite divergent subject matter and stylistic approaches. Both artists repurposed excerpts from previous artworks into material for new collages and applied various pigments (ink, acrylic, watercolor) to elements of many works in order to energize the composition. Where Bearden’s collages explore memory and autobiography within larger cultural narratives, Grossman’s collages are deeply psychological explorations of the human condition expressed via an open-ended material experimentation. 1 - Nancy Grossman, artist statement for It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Universe as Collage, Shirley Fiterman Gallery, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, August 16 – September 28, 1994. 2 - Romare Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings,” Leonardo 2 (January 1969), 17-18.