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Artist Exhibitions:
SELECTED EXHIBITS
2007 - Berlin, GERMANY
- Massachusetts General
Hospital, Boston,
Massachusetts, USA
- Marty's, Washington,
CT, USA
- White Space Gallery,
New Haven, CT, USA
- The Oliver Wolcott
Gallery, Litchfield, CT, USA
- Mill House Gallery,
Chester, CT, USA
- Central Gallery, Old
Saybrook, CT, USA
- Gallery 137, Indian
Orchard, MA, USA
- Gotham Art ...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Lascano Gallery, Great
Barrington, MA
http://lascanogallery.com/
White Space Gallery, New
Haven, CT
www.whitespacegallery.com
Central Gallery, Old Saybrook,
CT
Gallery 137, Indian Orchard,
MA www.gallery137.com
...
Further Information
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Artist Reviews:
Rediscovering the Artist
Within
By Kelly M. Barth
ARTIS Magazine - April/ May
2005
Isn’t it funny how the views
of our world change during the
brief journey from childhood
to adulthood? Recently, I
recalled a memory of my first
return visit to my former
elementary school. What a trip
...
Further Information
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Collections:
• St. Francis Medical Center,
Hartford, Connecticut
• Diane Marr, New Hartford,
Connecticut
• Prof. Ilene Reiner,
Connecticut
• Higher Education Center,
Waterbury, Connecticut
• Nell Vismantas, California
• Semina de Laurentis,
Connecticut
• Ruth Lesser Collection,
Connecticut
• Don & Linda Batt Collection,
New York
• Gerda Bolingbroke,
Connecticut
• Karen VanSeters, San
Francisco, California
• Ann Reid, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.
...
Further Information
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Artist Statement for Florin Ion Firimita
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ABOUT THE ARTIST:
FLORIN ION FIRIMITA was born in Romania, where he started painting at the age of five under the influence of his father, an amateur photographer, and his mother, a fashion designer and a decorative arts teacher. He worked for many years as an assistant and apprentice to renowned artist Constantin Ciocarlie, then studied studio, mural painting and art history. Between 1986 and 1990, he worked as the Set and Costume Painter and also as the Production Manager for the Art Department at the National Theater of Opera and Ballet in Bucharest.
In 1990, he immigrated to the United States.
In the United States, Mr.Firimita graduated in May 1997 from Central Connecticut State University, with a degree in Art Education, and in 2005 with a Masters from the same university. He teaches, paints, exhibits, lectures and writes art-criticism, essays and stories about his experiences. He has been an artist-in-residence for both public and private schools in Connecticut, and worked as an art advisor for the Connecticut State Department of Education, during the 2000-2001 International Art Exchange Program, in The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. He has been recently appointed co-director of the Summer Visual Arts Program at Central CT State University.
In the past years, his artwork has become widely collected and requested in numerous exhibits in the US, Europe and Australia.
In 1992, Mr. Firimita received an Honorable Mention at the National Arts Program, and in 1994 he was the recipient of the National Prize for Literature awarded by the New York University. In the United States, his writing has appeared, among others, in Works + Conversations, Tertulia Magazine, Many Mountains Moving, The Literary Review, The Sun, House Beautiful, and The Hartford Courant. In Europe, his fiction was published in England and France. He is currently working on his first novel, and was recently included in an anthology entitled "New American Writers."
Mr.Firimita has received his American citizenship in 1995. His artistic evolution has been documented in the 2004 film "The Art of Leaving," directed by Brian Kamerzel. The film has been an official selection of the 2003 Santa Fe International Film Festival, the 2004 Durango Film Festival, the Artivist Film Festival, the IFP Film Market in New York City. Most recently, the film was screened at Steven Spielberg's Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, and at the 23rd International Film Festival of Films on Art in Montreal (2005).
ARTIST STATEMENT
I have been living in the United States since the summer of 1990. When I arrived here, I had no sense of direction, artistic or otherwise. Shifting from my artistic beliefs rooted in a classical/ humanistic tradition to the fast-pace of a commercial culture was bewildering and exciting in the same time. It took me years of immersing into my new environment in order to find a sense of purpose for what I am doing artistically today. Sometimes during the past three years, a radical shift happened in my art. I have reached a point when being comfortable with my techniques (Eastern European, classically-trained easel painter) became a roadblock. I didn’t have to please anyone. I started looking for a new language based on my divided identity, between Europe and the United States. America is primarily a visual culture. How do we choose? How do we find meaning in this visual pandemonium? Some images are subversive, and feel like rust, slowly decaying our perception of reality. Then, there are the one-nightstands of commercial photography, the streets, the museums, the television, the ads, the movies, the fashion statements, the unforgettable and the forgivable. Other images, the apologizing images of a Golgotha of worn shoes at Auschwitz, the mountains of eye glasses, the suicide bombers, the forgotten tools of introspection of the past century that has failed to see and learn from its own wounds, are competing for our attention as well. We live in an enormous, constantly changing puzzle. I am trying to connect my sensibility with the viewer’s. In this light, my new mixed-media compositions are riddles born out of the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined, the private and the universal, the desire and the cancelled desire. I have been using both symbols linked to my family and my Romanian roots, and found imagery, to which I am not initially related. I love life, and I believe in beauty as a way of putting order in chaos. What I do is a reflection of my interest in philosophy, music, photography, literature, film, nature, and history. I find amazing sources of inspiration in everything surrounding me: my students’ work; my walks around the streets of New York City or Paris; a Mahler symphony; Proust and Borges; a Godard film; a graffiti-covered wall; an old photograph found at a flea market. I am trying to create a sense of mystery in which the viewer is invited to complete my cosmology. Meaning is never a one-way road, and therefore is always a result of a collaboration between what I am trying to communicate, and what you are willing to see. And maybe you will find that humanism could do more than survive in that precious space between Paris Hilton and Abu Ghraib.
New York City, November 2006
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