Merle Temkin

Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, known for vibrant, abstracted paintings based upon her own improved fingerprint, and earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s. Her ham it up has often functioning 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 on the law her acquit yourself between logical experimentation and intuitive exploration. Her painted and sewn "Fingerprints" body of enactment 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 on cave walls." Critic Dominique Nahas wrote "Temkin's labor-intensive cartography sutures the map of autobiography onto that of the universal in rapidly revelatory ways." Her public sculptures have been recognized for their sharp perceptual effects and encouragement of viewer participation. Temkin's take action has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, New York Magazine, and the Washington Post. Her be in belongs to the remaining collections of the Racine Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and Israel Museum, among others.