John Himmelfarb

John Himmelfarb (born 1946) is an American artist, known for idiosyncratic, yet modernist-based con across many media. Diverse influences ranging from Miró, Matisse and Picasso to Dubuffet, New York theoretical artists subsequent to de Kooning, Guston, and Pop artists notify his work, described by critics and curators as chaotically mysterious and tightly constructed. He often employs energetic, gestural line, dense patterns of accumulated shapes, and fluid movement between figuration and abstraction, using strategies of concealment and notice to create a desirability of meaning that is both playful and elusive. His be in is after that unified by "a circulating library" of motifs and organizing structures, such as geographic and urban mapping, abstracted natural and industrial forms, and language systems. Assessing him at mid-career, New Art Examiner’s Andy Argy wrote "Himmelfarb’s art is original […] His unabashed combination in graphic art, emphasizing drawing on zenith of painting, has earned him an important place accompanied by artists who make drawings into major aesthetic statements." Himmelfarb next-door turned to monumental paintings that critic Christopher Moore called joyful, luminous, and frenetic pyrotechnical displays. In 2006, he began to devote considerable studio epoch to sculpture that curator Gregg Hertzlieb described as an outing of the "human craving for operate and (our) enduring incorporation with metamorphosis and transformation."

Himmelfarb has an extensive exhibition history, notably at the Terry Dintenfass and Luise Ross galleries (New York), Jean Albano Gallery (Chicago), Chicago Cultural Center, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Eskenazi Museum of Art (Indiana University, Bloomington), Brooklyn Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago. His take effect sits in exceeding fifty public collections in the US and abroad, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Museum, and High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He has been qualified with a Yaddo Fellowship and an Arts/Industry Residency at Kohler, Wisconsin, as capably as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Illinois Arts Council. Himmelfarb works and lives in Chicago and Spring Green, Wisconsin, with his wife, Molly Day.