Descent

John Himmelfarb is an American artist, known for idiosyncratic, yet modernist-based work across many media. Diverse influences ranging from Miró, Matisse and Picasso to Dubuffet, New York school artists like de Kooning, Guston, and Pop artists inform his work, described by critics and curators as chaotically complex and tightly constructed. He often employs energetic, gestural line, dense patterns of accumulated shapes, and fluid movement between figuration and abstraction, using strategies of concealment and revelation to create a sense of meaning that is both playful and elusive. His work is also unified by "a circulating library" of motifs and organizing structures, such as geographic and urban mapping, abstracted natural and industrial forms, and language systems. Assessing him at mid-career, New Art Examiner’s Andy Argy wrote "Himmelfarb’s art is original […] His unabashed immersion in graphic art, emphasizing drawing over painting, has earned him an important place among artists who make drawings into major aesthetic statements." Himmelfarb next turned to monumental paintings that critic Christopher Moore called joyful, luminous, and frenetic pyrotechnical displays. In 2006, he began to devote considerable studio time to sculpture that curator Gregg Hertzlieb described as an expression of the "human need for play and (our) enduring fascination with metamorphosis and transformation."

Chicago, IL, USA