Artist: Gerome Kamrowski

For Gerome Kamrowski, the 1940s were a time of great change and free experimentation. With seemingly endless modes of expression, Kamrowski found inspiration everywhere from x-rays of plants to crystallography to the “cosmic rhythm” which he believed bound all things together. Nothing was off limits, and Kamrowski was willing to stretch the mold of what it meant to be an American Surrealist.

Gerome Kamrowski was born in Warren, Minnesota in 1914 and studied with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League. He was employed by the WPA and studied under Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League during the Great Depression. He exhibited in early American Abstract Artists (AAA) shows in the late 1930s and lived and worked among other artists influenced by Surrealism and the European emigrés fleeing Nazism. These included William Baziotes, Peter Busa, Jackson Pollock, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and Roberto Matta. In the winter of 1939-40, the artist collaborated with Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes on one of the world’s first drip paintings, which was pivotal in the transition from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism.

In 1946, Kamrowski relocated back to the midwest to Ann Arbor, Michigan to teach at the University of Michigan School of Art. It was a career that would span thirty-eight years and would encourage countless others, such as Mike Kelley, to push their artistic boundaries. Yet this professorship largely removed the artist from the geographic and financial center of the art world, and this exhibition is the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in New York since 2004.

“I don't like to put labels on my sculptures or my paintings,” Kamrowski remarked. “I don't like to say they're surrealist, or cubist, or whatever. I hope my art puts people in a certain frame of mind, and that it isn't just intellectual. I hope they feel a certain way, maybe happy. When you see the Grand Canyon or the ocean, you must feel a certain way. There are no labels for that.”