Loretta Dunkelman’s paintings and works on paper combine minimalist forms with subtle, rich and often painterly surface layering. She completed her undergraduate degree at Douglass College, Rutgers in the 1950s under European abstract painter Theodore Brenson and Allan Kaprow and received her master’s from Hunter College.
Dunkelman’s work is marked by an interest in architecture and aspects of negative space or the void. The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the philosophy of Lao Tzu inform her early minimalist paintings. Her work from the 1970's is formal, classical and objective, inspired by travel in Greece. Geometry and surface created through a process of layering, caran d’ache oil-wax chalk on paper are key elements. The focus is on line and proportion - the relationship between the fragment and the implied whole.
Dunkelman is a founder of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women’s gallery in the United States, where she had six one-person shows between 1972 and 1987. She was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, organized by art historian and critic Lucy Lippard. In 1972 she co-organized Thirteen Women Artists, the first major exhibitions of women, which included Louise Bourgeois and Mary Miss. Her work has been featured in a number of important museum exhibitions: the 1973 Whitney Biennial and American Drawings at the Whitney; the city-wide multi-site exhibition, Women Choose Women; and On Surface at the Katonah Art Gallery. Dunkelman’s work is in many public and private collections, including The Chase Manhattan Bank; City University Graduate Center, NY; Colgate University, Hamilton, NY; The University of Cincinnati, OH; and The Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C. She has exhibited at numerous museums, galleries, and universities. Dunkelman is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the CAPS award and an American Association of University Women Fellowship. She has had residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1961.
