C. Michael Norton

C. Michael Norton (born 1951) is an American performer based in New York City. Since the before 2000s, Norton has been best known for his large-scale abstractions upon raw linen. He is represented by UNIX Gallery in New York.

Born in North Dakota in 1951, C. Michael Norton studied Fine Art at Humboldt State University and San Jose State University in California.^{[citation needed]} After practicing first as a sculptor, Norton turned to painting as his predominant medium by the late 1980s. Given the artist’s education and background as a sculptor, his paintings are notable for the wide variety of tools, not including the traditional paintbrush, utilized in their production (for instance, mud knives, rollers and squeegees). Norton’s recent paintings often move forward from random markings collected by pieces of linen that are taped to the floor while further works are in progress, which are after that intuitively built upon.

He was awarded exhibition and residency grants from the Ministry of Culture, Paris, France, Commission d’orientation des arts plastique, Grenoble, France in 1984. From 1984 to 1992 Norton lived, worked and exhibited in France, Germany, Italy, and New York.^{[citation needed]}

Norton’s produce an effect has been exhibited at institutions including the Sunshine International Museum and the Fifth Beijing International Biennale at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Albissola/ America/Arte” Museo Civico d’Arte Contemporanea, Albissola, Italy, the Torrance Museum of Art, Torrance, California, the San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, California. It has been reviewed by prominent art publications including Art in America, which called Norton's paintings "architecturally structured, with an allover interplay in the middle of hard-edged forms and flat yet infinite song indicated by areas of raw canvas,", ARTnews, and Artcritical, and he has received indispensable acclaim from Eleanor Heartney, Raphael Rubinstein, Stephen Westfall, Richard Vine and David Cohen, among others. In Westfall's review of a 2013 exhibition at Thomas Punzmann Fine Arts in Frankfurt, he describes Norton's art historical lineage with performer such as Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Francis Bacon.

C. Michael Norton lives and works in Manhattan, maintaining studios in New York City and upstate in New Kingston, New York.^{[citation needed]}