Robert Birmelin

Artist: Robert Birmelin

Educated at The Cooper Union Art School and Yale University's School of Art, this New Jersey born artist has had 49 one person exhibitions. His work has been acquired by 40 public collections including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshorn Museum. Among the various Art magazines and journals where articles on Mr. Birmelin's work have appeared are Art in America, American Artist, and Art Forum. Additionally, he has received numerous grants and awards from such organizations as The American Academy in Rome, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the American Institute of Arts & Letters.

From the mid '70s until 1992, Mr. Birmelin found his principal inspiration in the streets of New York City where he was fascinated by the crowds. His large paintings were about movement, focus, selective attention, and the suggestion of the relationship between the depicted figures and the painting's viewer. "In 1993, I felt that I wished to explore more inward, subjective aspects of my past", says Robert Birmelin. "This was not just a matter of changed subject matter, but of research into the properties of memory. This led me to devise a pictorial structure keyed to the instability and ambiguity that often accompanies our effort to interpret past events and behaviors. At that time I started to work on 'reversible compositions'. These works give an initially credible depiction of place which, after a moment, reveal insoluble contradictions created by contrasting reverse images of equal visual weight. Finally, these paintings are about states of mind.

These images may be enlarged simply by clicking on them.

"Plaza Hotel"