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
Artist's Gallery
|