Eros/Thanatos: The Expressionist Prints of Diane Thodos
Firecat Projects
Opening: Sept 27, 7 – 10
2019 N. Damen Avenue
Chicago
207-249-9486
September 27 – November 9
Tuesday – Friday 10 – 6, Saturday 10 -5
Firecat Projects presents Eros/Thanatos: The Expressionist Prints of Diane Thodos. Her art merges two of the most significant Modernist Expressionist art movements of the 20th century -American Abstract Expressionism and German Expressionism from the early 20th century, influences that were transmitted to her from significant sources representing art at the very core of these two movements.
In 1984 she worked with Jackson Pollock’s teacher Stanley William Hayter at his Parisian print shop Studio 17 where she learned Hayter’s Surrealist based exercise of using automatic gesture – abstract automatism – the same exercise that was taught to Jackson Pollock in 1945 leading to the creation of his famous Abstract Expressionist drip paintings.
She began a thirty year friendship with the major German Expressionist print collectors Marcia and Granvil Specks in 1992, studying their internationally renowned collection of 400 major works by artists such as Eric Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Max Beckman, and Kathe Kollwitz, now on permanent exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Their ground-breaking approaches etching, lithography and woodblock techniques had a critical impact on Thodos’ innovative approach to printmaking.
These combined expressionist influences in Thodos’ work reflect the current cultural zeitgeist, ranging from the ecstatic to the tragic: the joyful release of feminist agency of Eros – or the suffering created by war and injustice of Thanatos. The opposing tensions of life and death, lyricism and tragedy, are historically unique in her work because of how they fuse Abstract Expressionist spontaneity with the constructed rigor of German Expressionist figuration and composition.
Diane Thodos has worked professionally for 40 years and is a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient who has exhibited and been represented by galleries internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum among many others. For more information visit dianethodos.com.