Shirley Jaffe (artist)

Shirley Jaffe
Born (1923-02-10) February 10, 1923[1]
New Jersey, USA
Known for abstract painter and sculptor

Shirley Jaffe, abstract painter and sculptor, was born in New Jersey, USA, in 1923 and educated at Cooper Union in New York City. She moved to Paris in 1949 as a young painter and has carried on her career primarily in France, although she returns regularly to the United States where she has exhibited since the early '90s at the Holly Solomon Gallery and in other New York group shows. In Paris she has exhibited at the Galerie Fournier and later began to show her work at the Nathalie Obadia Gallery. In New York City she has shown her work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.[2]

Paintings

Shirley Jaffe began as an abstract expressionist but her style changed to the flat, uninflected surfaces and single-colour shapes that she has used ever since. In 1968, a grant year in Berlin may reunited her thinking with the European abstraction of Arp,Tauber-Arp, Kandinski and Herbin. "It changed when I went to Berlin," she said. "I had a feeling that my paintings were being read as landscapes, which was not my intention. I felt I had to clear out the woods."[3]

Though she works on small gouaches as preparations, when she paints in oil Jaffe inscribes her forms very large , on canvases that are more often than not, larger than a person. At this scale a longish shape may seem more like the traces of the trajectory of her drawing arm , as in an Abstract Expressionist painting. Yet , as if she were painting a geometrical abstraction, Jaffe eschews bleeding edges or almost any changes in density or atmosphere. With hard, clear edges, and flat grounds, she depends on the presence and location of discrete shapes whose structures themselves must yield up movement.

Rosenthal, 2000.

Work since 2000

In 2000, the state government and the City of Perpignan commissioned Jaffe to design the stained glass windows of the chapel. The installation of the completed windows coincided with a retrospective of Jaffe's work at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Céret.

References

  1. Jaffe, Shirley. "United States Public Records, 1970-2009". FamilySearch. Retrieved 23 July 2014.
  2. Roberta Smith, NY Times review, 2009
  3. Rubinstein, Raphael (April 2010). "Shirley Jaffe with Raphael Rubinstein". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 3/7/12. Check date values in: |access-date= (help)

Sources

External links

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