Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Eleanore Mikus

Discipline: Visual Art – painting
MacDowell Fellowships: 1969
Eleanore Mikus (1927-2017) was an American artist who began painting in the late 1950s in the Abstract Expressionist mode. In 1969, she began painting simple, cartoon-like images in bold, colorful strokes that anticipated Neo-Expressionism of the early 1980s. In the mid-1980s, Mikus resumed creating her abstract works. Since 1961, she had also been creating works of folded paper in which the “folds” make lines or textures that become integral to the material itself. Mikus had her first solo exhibition at the Pietrantonia Gallery in New York in 1960. She showed paintings of geometric shapes on sectional canvases to allow the real lines of the joined canvases to interact with the painted shapes on the surfaces. In 1963, she exhibited at Pace Gallery in Boston. Later in New York City, she was making monochromatic works of black, white, and gray painted on uneven supports made from pieces of wood fitted together. Thickly painted and sanded many times so that the color became like a skin molded by and integral to the bumpy structure beneath, these works, called Tablets are distinguished by a play of light and shadow on the surfaces that provides an organic sense of movement. By the early 1980s, when Neo-Expressionism was at the height of its popularity, Mikus returned to making abstract works, working on canvas and developing her paperfolds to a larger scale. In 2006-2007, she had an important exhibition at The Drawing Center, New York, NY, in which she showed 150 works dating from 1959-2006.

Studios

Alexander

Eleanore Mikus worked in the Alexander studio.

Originally designed to be a visual art gallery, this facility was built in memory of the late John White Alexander (1856-1915) and funded by Elizabeth Alexander and their son James. John White Alexander was highly regarded as a portrait painter and, in the early part of the 20th century, served…

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