Merle Temkin

Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, known for vibrant, abstracted paintings based on her own enlarged fingerprint, and earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s. Her work has often involved 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 play in her work between systematic experimentation and intuitive exploration. Her painted and sewn "Fingerprints" body of work 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." and encouragement of viewer participation. Temkin's work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, New York Magazine, and the Washington Post. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Racine Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and Israel Museum, among others.

Background and life Born in Chicago in 1937, Temkin attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1950s before returning to earn a BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959. While there, she painted in an Abstract-Expressionist style, but sought to develop an authentic voice of her own. Soon after graduating, she moved with her husband to San Francisco, where they had three children, Lara, David and Alex. Temkin continued to work in the 1960s, largely in collage, while taking courses at the San Francisco Art Institute, eventually earning an MFA in sculpture in 1974.

In 1978, a move to New York City opened new opportunities, including Temkin's distinctive mirrored installations of the 1980s and work co-editing the "Feminism and Ecology" issue (#13, 1981) of Heresies, the feminist magazine. In 1987, her first permanent, site-specific commission—Sundial (1987), a work in which she etched the image of her hand into rocks—was accidentally destroyed in Israel just after completion; as a result, she shifted to interior, more personal works. By 1990, she embarked on the fingerprint paintings that would dominate her efforts for the next two decades. Temkin often finds inspiration in travel; seeing zebras in Africa suggested a new, striated approach to her fingerprint works, while an observation in London in 2010 spurred a shift in subject matter to trees. Temkin has exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Israel, Germany and South Korea, with solo exhibitions at PS1, Art Resources Transfer and Artists Space in New York, and the Chicago Cultural Center, and a sculpture commission at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. She lives and works in New York City.

Work Temkin's work can be classified into three main bodies: site-specific installations and sculptures (1980–1987); mixed-media paintings based on her enlarged fingerprints (1990–2010); and paintings based on tree forms, begun in 2010. While distinct, each body share Temkin's "additive, bit-by-bit construction" method,

Site-specific installations & sculpture Temkin's sculptural work has engaged with issues of identity, perception and participation, typically through the use of mirrors that create fragmented or distorted views, as well as visual blending of installation and environment. In the 1980s, she created a series of six-foot tall, sometimes-undulating "passageway" or arbor-like installations featuring two-inch strips of mirrored plexiglass with matching open intervals between them. These works elicited participation through the "confusion" caused by "strobe-light-quick alternations of reflection and background," encouraging a shift in perspective and a reconsideration of what constitutes art. The New York Times''' Michael Brenson described one such work, State of the Art (1986), as a funhouse-like, voluptuous sculpture suggesting both Minimalism and Surrealism, through its effects of spatial and visual dislocation. Temkin's public works of this type include: Mirror-Fence for Joanne and Merlin's Canopy (Artpark, Lewiston, NY, 1981); Walk-Thru (Ward's Island, NY, 1981); and Walker's Walk (Piedmont Park, Atlanta, 1985).

By 1988, Temkin created public sculptures only by invitation. For Making Waves (Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY, 1991) and Diamonds and Zig-Zag (National Building Museum, Washington D.C., 1996), she "stitched" over 3,000 small mirrors into the openings of chain-link fencing to create 80-foot and 150-foot long (respectively), site-specific installations. Works in this vein include City Gates (Battery Park, NYC, 1979) and Mirror Piece for Phyllis, a guerilla work Temkin installed on park backstops as part of a 1981 Washington Project for the Arts "Streetworks" show in D.C., which authorities forced her to remove.

Fingerprint mixed media paintings In 1990, Temkin began experimenting with her own greatly enlarged fingerprints, mixed-media, and non-traditional needlework. Working on large, unprimed canvasses that she stained, painted and stitched, she employed strategies of overlap, repetition, slippage, and disorienting shifts of scale to add rawness, incongruity and ambiguity to the pieces. yet also suggested mazes, exotic animal hides, Reviewers have most frequently noted the paintings for their rich color, pulsating surfaces, and expansive and varied visual language. ARTnews' Barbara A. McAdam called it "gently self-reflective" in its "hinting at exposed secrets and women's work." Artist and writer Lois Martin attributed much of the work's impact to Temkin's needlework, suggesting its crude sutures and patterns expressed feminist, as well as formal and philosophical concerns. In a review of Temkin's "Fingerprints" exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, Kevin Nance called it "effective and haunting," noting the work's "sliced-and-reconfigured quality suggests a fracturing and reassembling of identity with implications that are both psychological and—especially in this era of increasing surveillance—political."

Trees paintings

In 2010, Temkin shifted subject matter from fingerprints to trees, still retaining her labor-intensive working process. Recalling both her fence installations and her re-assembled fingerprints, she describes her process as perceiving "negative space on canvas in three dimensions… By carving away this space with paint, the tree is revealed, a process of working from the outside to depict the inside." In these in-depth explorations of color, Temkin allows under-layers to show through, creating depth, vitality and a visual record of its own development. The series, evolving through Temkin's rigorous exploration, has moved in varying degrees toward and away from abstraction, producing often surprising results that range from "striking cactus-like silhouettes, painted in desert-twilight tones" to graphic forms resembling thermographic maps, visual afterimages, and reversed video stills.

Recognition Temkin's work is held in the permanent collections of several institutions and organizations. In 2015, the Racine Art Museum acquired 35 works on paper from five series between 1995 and 2008. In 2009, the city of Karmiel, Israel commissioned She, a nine-foot galvanized iron and steel mirror sculpture, for permanent display in its Park Haglil. Temkin's work is also in the permanent collections of the Israel Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Jersey City Museum, and Boston Fidelity Investments, among others. She has been the subject of two monographs, Merle Temkin: Portfolio Collection and Merle Temkin: Personal Markings''. She has also received awards from: The Vermont Studio Center (residency fellowship, 2003); the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation (2002); the Richard Florsheim Art Fund Museum Award, for the purchase of her work by the Museum of Arts & Design (2001); the Hereward Lester Cooke Foundation; and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation (1984).