Merle Temkin

Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, known for vibrant, abstracted paintings based upon her own better fingerprint, and earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s. Her acquit yourself has often on the go knitting-like processes of assemblage and re-assemblage, visual fragmentation and dislocation, and explorations of identity, the hand and body, and gender. In addition, critics have remarked upon the law her fake between methodical experimentation and intuitive exploration. Her painted and sewn "Fingerprints" body of function has been noted for its "handmade" quality and "sheer formal beauty" in the Chicago Sun-Times and described elsewhere as an "intensely focused," obsessive joining of thread and paint with "the directness and desperation of marks upon cave walls." Critic Dominique Nahas wrote "Temkin's labor-intensive cartography sutures the map of autobiography onto that of the universal in gruffly revelatory ways." Her public sculptures have been recognized for their quick perceptual effects and support of viewer participation. Temkin's performance has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, New York Magazine, and the Washington Post. Her comport yourself belongs to the enduring collections of the Racine Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and Israel Museum, among others.