Description
Renowned artist Irwin Kremens collages, paintings, and sculptures are composed from such diverse materials as scraps of weathered paper, wasp nests, saw blades, and steel. Irwin Kremen: Beyond Black Mountain (1966 to 2006) is the exhibition catalog accompanying a retrospective covering forty years of the artists career. The work will be on display at Duke Universitys Nasher Museum of Art from March 22, 2007 through June 17, 2007. A longtime North Carolina resident and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duke University, Kremen studied literature and writing with M. C. Richards at the legendary Black Mountain College in the mid-1940s. There he met John Cage, David Tutor, and Merce Cunningham, all of whom became close friends, artistic inspirations, and ardent supporters. Kremen did not show his work publicly until 1978 at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. That first exhibition was mostly small non-representational collages constructed of weathered, faded, and battered papers that he collected from public spaces in Europe. In 1979 his works were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institutions National Collection of Fine Arts and were received enthusiastically; the Washington Star heralded him as an American master of collage on the level of Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, and Romare Bearden. Since that timein spite of purposefully operating outside the mainstream art world and with no formal trainingKremens work has been shown in nearly thirty solo shows in the United States and abroad and has been favorably reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Artforum International, the Chicago Tribune, and Art News, among other publications. His work has been collected by museums andprivate collectors across the country. The catalog illustrates in full color more than one hundred collages as well as twelve sc
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