Robert Feintuch (born January 3, 1953, Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American
painter
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
who lives and works in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
.
In his work, Feintuch “uses the body to pursue psychologically suggestive meanings,” and in many of his
paintings
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
he has used himself as a model. In their combination of the “sublime with the banal, the serious and the ridiculous,”
Feintuch’s paintings have been consistently seen as both comic and rooted in psychological life.
Life
Robert Feintuch was born in 1953 in Jersey City,
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...
, and raised in Levittown, Pennsylvania. He moved to New York in 1970 to study at Cooper Union, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1974. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976.
Feintuch began to exhibit in galleries in the mid-1980s, and his work has been shown in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe.
Early Work: Abstract and Ear Paintings
Trained as an
abstract painter in the 1970s, when
minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
was a dominant way of working, Feintuch made a slow and gradual transition towards painting figuratively. His first solo exhibition in New York in 1988 included abstract paintings with broad expanses of color, alongside paintings of ears isolated on black fields. In his subsequent solo exhibition at Daniel Newburg Gallery in 1992, Feintuch exhibited large-scale black paintings, all containing life-sized images of ears,
and he continued to work exclusively in black and white until 1996.
Figurative Paintings
In the early 1990s, Feintuch began working from objects he had in the studio.
His 1996 exhibition at CRG Gallery was titled “The Middle Ages” and it included black and white paintings of mundane objects like buckets, clocks, and ladders, juxtaposed with life-sized paintings of suits of armor.
Having worked with body fragments, including ears and arms, since the 1980s, Feintuch started to use himself as a model in the mid-90s, and he simultaneously returned to working in full color.
Shortly after, he started a series of paintings of clouds, and clouds began to show up as a suggestive and ongoing metaphoric motif in his figure paintings, as in his 2013 painting, entitled ''Feet Up''.
Critical reception
In the catalogue for an exhibition of the Sonnabend Collection at the Serralves Foundation, Suzanne Cotter said that “Feintuch’s work embraces a kind of productive ambiguity…he uses the tension between the heroic, eternal quality of mythological figures and themes of mundane quotidian life to reinterpret myth '...figuring and reliving it with deadpan theatricality, almost to the point of farce.’"
Other writers have remarked on relationships between Feintuch’s work and slapstick, seeing in the paintings a presentation of self, that in its “mix of heroism and humiliation (or myth and cartoon),”
is both vulnerable and comic.
“’Cro-Magnon Bacchus’” is the title given…to the portrait of an unathletic, rather ectomorphic, hen-breasted type (whose) club dangles down like a languid phallus.”
“…if Mr. Feintuch is a cynic about human nature — or the making of art, or the nature of truth, or the possibility of beauty — he is, fortunately, almost as funny as Diogenes.”
“These works wrestle with the debilitations and humiliations mortality imposes on us, but also with the possibility of grace, which we find in beauty and in hope.”
Often seen as addressing painterly concerns, many writers have remarked on the unusual luminosity
of his paintings: “Feintuch’s a terrific painter, whatever the subject. These paintings glow.”
Awards and Grants
2008: Guggenheim Fellowship
2003: Leube Foundation, Residency Fellowship
1999: Bogliasco, Residency Fellowship
1996: Rockefeller Foundation, Residency Fellowship
1977: National Endowment for the Arts
1974: Sarah Hewitt Memorial Prize for Painting
References
External links
Official site of the artistRobert Feintuch in Conversation with Phong Bui (June 2014)Artist's listing at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, NY
{{DEFAULTSORT:Feintuch, Robert
1953 births
20th-century American painters
American male painters
21st-century American painters
Living people
Cooper Union alumni