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Affirmation, an exhibition of new
works by Bruce Dorfman -- arresting abstract assemblages in combined
media fusing painting and sculpture that resist predictable spatial
boundary, will open at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on
Thursday, June 16. The exhibition will remain on view through
July 29.
Dorfman with an impressive exhibition history
exceeding more than five decades has an abstract language of his own
that underlines his dual focus in creating a strong art experience
through geometric structure and through intriguingly sensuous
luminosity.
Dorfman’s innovative and provocative
abstractions often reflect his defiance of probable surface order by
his scrambling into rational space layers of additional visual
planes. There’s a certain physicality and redefinition of
space in his constructions with the adhering of mundane, discarded
and perhaps disparate objects, there is also emphasis, says Phyllis
Braff, former art critic for the New York Times and historian, on
risk, for Dorfman still seeks ways to examine and extend every
potential for an even stronger art experience.
Dorfman writes, “The act of artistic creation
is a wholehearted affirmation of life. I make I make no
separation between the many meanings of my art and whatever the many
meanings of my life may be. Whatever goes on in my paintings
is simply an extension of whatever else I do, think, feel and
believe, from day to day and year to year. The way my art
looks, and the feelings my art reflects, is not the result of a
self-conscious decision, but the result of a deeply felt need, and a
use of formal means, as necessary to the work. Both the need
and the formal means are rooted in an extreme intensity of
experience and choice.
I am very much driven by a lasting, abstract
notion and ideal of beauty. I try to get some of this into my
work through an ongoing process of strengthening and clarification.
In all my art, I seek strength of statement through refinement,
elaboration and simplicity of form. All of this is somehow
driven by a need to see a kind of beauty that is not already there.
If it were already there, I would not need to create it.
“My art is never 'about a subject,’ continues
Dorfman, nor does it deal exclusively with some consideration or
preoccupation about technique or form. Each work is a
summation and consolidation of innermost feelings and outlook.
I do not seek to associate or identify with any particular approach,
genre, agenda or 'school' of art. Emphases, risks and approach
evolve through time, from one work to another. It seems to me
that each and every work is inevitably new, with its own problems
and joys. The problems are always in abundance, but the joys
remain.” |
