Domenick Turturro, American (1936 - 2002)

Born: New York - May 13, 1936

Education
Cooper Union, New York
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
New School from Social Research, NY

Grants
Gottlieb Foundation, April 1984

Museums
Joseph Hirshhorn Museum
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Modern Art - Lending Department
Witherspoon Museum, North Carolina
The Greenville County Museum, South Carolina

Collections (Selection)
Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefeller Collection)
ABC
Union Carbide Corporation
AP Baer, Jr. New York
Bache & Company
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection
Ivest-Wellington Corporation, Philadelphia
Steven Pain, Boston
Montgomery Securities Limited, San Francisco
Tom Weisel Collection, San Francisco
Collection of Jerry Treisman, New York
Touche Ross, Newark

All-over abstraction tends to lure painters toward heroics. Domenick Turturro's new paintings show all-over patternings, yet he avoids the difficulties of his style admirably. They are covered in a gestural fashion, but the artist's hand is always guided by a notion of shape particular to each work. Sometimes this shape is islandlike and orange, floating in profusion against a dark background. Sometimes the shapes are fan- or flower-like, scraped onto the surface in arcs to achieve an effect of bright translucency. Occasionally, a very subtle reference to printed fabrics is made. Here, low-keyed shapes are repeated across the surface with variations that suggest the play of very soft interior light.

Turturro's range of color is extraordinary, from keyed-up, "artificial" aquas and magentas to maroons and ochres which seem almost to have acquired a patina of use. This latter effect is an illusion, a helpful one. It reminds the viewer that paintings do indeed have a use, they are intended to engage the eye. This can be done, as so many allover painters attempt to do by overwhelming the eye. Turturro avoids the grandiose by holding the scale of pictorial incident to a very intimate scale. The eye enters his paintings where shapes float toward each other or touch or overlap in especially interesting ways. The eye stays with "the painting because it is always guided toward variations" on the initial incident whatever it may be in a particular viewing. Sometimes the eye is drawn over this surface. Sometimes it is drawn into the shallow space between shapes.

Occasionally the patterning is so complex that one almost has the sense of seeing behind shape, another illusion, this time a quietly dazzling one. The illusion means, in effect, that Turturro's imagery finds a completeness, a selfenclosed sufficiency, in spite of its potential limitlessness. Instead of exhausting themselves in striving for the monumental, these paintings come to rest in a beautifully balanced realization of their particular premises.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
• Aspects Gallery, New York
• A.M. Sachs Gallery, New York
• Al bright Knox Art Gallery
• Members Gallery, Buffalo, New York
• 21st New England Silvermine Guild, New Canaan, Conn.

SELECTED ONE-MAN SHOWS
• 1968
  • Allan Stone Gallery, New York
• 1971
  • Allan Stone Gallery, New York
• 1974
  • Allan Stone Gallery, New York