Nancy grossman book

Private Collection; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

Artist

born New York City 1940

Biography

Grossman completed a fine arts degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and subsequently received a Guggenheim fellowship for travel abroad. Although initially influenced by Richard Lindner and David Smith, Grossman's paintings, collages, and sculpture come out of a distinctly individual understanding of the psychological reality of contemporary life. Concerned with people as victims, Grossman depicted headless human forms tightly bound with shackles in a series of drawings, and in collages created figures whose contorted postures and featureless faces convey an unidentifiable sense of panic. In the late 1960s Grossman began her well-known series of carved wooden heads. Covered with leather, they often have closed zippers for mouths and are adorned with horns, buttons, or metal studs. In these sculptures Grossman symbolizes repression and the bestial side of human nature.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the

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Nancy Grossman: Tough Life Diary

The trappings of constraint would continue throughout much of Grossman’s work, including drawings, collage paintings, and sculptures of male figures struggling against restraints. With their imposing muscular bodies and exquisite draftsmanship, her drawings have often been likened to Renaissance and Mannerist works. As critic Donald Kuspit noted, “She pulls out every linear stop, insisting on the integrity of the lines that define her figures yet varying their density so rapidly within the same work that they seem sometimes like feathers in a vacuum, sometimes ominously heavy and urgent.” In the early 1970s, while disenchantment and frustration with the Vietnam War raged on, Grossman began a series of drawings and collage paintings that depict guns strapped across a figure’s eyes, nose, and mouth—an appendage that appears both foreign yet strikingly permanent to the body.

Since she began making art in the 1950s, Grossman has steadily explored collage with a similar experimentation and attention to materials. Many of her collage works