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Artist Statement:
My art is about the power of
the image to bypass the
limitations of the self,
controlled through language
and its paradigms. The image
is a life raft. The connection
of the seer to the seen is the
same as self to other , or me
to you. Images, whether they
be paintings, digital works or
videos are gestalts, and
embody identity. My art is
about figure and ground that
is transformed in many ways-
materials, subject and
meaning. I am a situationist
and believe that art can
create new paradigms for the
future. It is a protected
frame of content that can
carry meaning, experimental
ideas and projections. I have
been a painter and sculptor,
and still work in those media,
but my primary form is now
digital art and video, or
hybrid combination.
Besides being an artist, I
have curated and organized
many exhibitions, in New York.
The Monumental Shows, Terminal
Show (Co-curator), Pan Arts,
Plexus. Recently curated "From
the Ashes" 911 Memorials and
"Ground Zero" at the Detroit
Museum of New Art, and
Freyberger Gallery - Penn
State Berks Campus I am a
Doctoral Candidate in Art and
Art Education at Columbia
University Teachers College...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
2008
Pool Art Fair Chelsea Hotel
Harvard University Lehman Hall
Speech Acts: Art Responding to
Language, Rhetoric and
Politics
Museum of New Art Detroit-
Souped-Up Pontiac - Chief
Pontiac and the Fall of
Detroit, curator and artist
Frank Shifreen is an
impassioned artist with a wide
range of work that ...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
My belief is that artists
should organize and form
collectives to create and
display work.
websites
www.drinkink.org
www.thedigitalmuseum.org
www.retiform.act.cx
www.shifreen.com...
Further Information
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Reviews for Frank Shifreen:
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Review in New York Arts Journal/Dr. Nina Zvancevic/ Winter 2001
Frank Shifreen is a New York artist who has had more than 40 shows of his painting and sculpture in the U.S and Europe, yet visibility has evaded him and the place he rightly deserves.
He is probably known more for his curation and organization of art events and shows of a timely and political nature than for his work as an artist. His work has been a staple of the underground shows, raves, aand knock-about galleries that have existed on the Lower East Side , Brooklyn and other areas for many years. His first painterly impulse was under the wings of the great abstract expressionists, people such as Clifford Still, Philip Guston and de Kooning- thus his work, powerful as it is, is not heavily didactic or heavy with messages. His message is discreet and embedded within the humanist content. When the artist was doing series of figures in the horrendous 80's in New York, we were able to observe distant, vague emaciated figures in his canvasses, painted in the half light like the people loved and depicted by Rembrandt. He mainly ignored the contours and simplified the form. Shifreen's commitment was of a political nature. He says he wanted to give voice to the people who were voiceless, anonymous and invisible.
There was a phase of "collaging" his small canvasses and fitting them into greater pictures , which were conglomerations and summations that grew into the hundreds of pieces filling whole galleries with his works. the paintings were eclectic, multiple
styles that were stories , diaries and dreams. Later the murals became single works that filled the space with brash cubist and figurative structures.
I like his "Neo-Surrealist" paintings that looked liked Max Ernst on an Acid Jag, who got lost and slipped in hyperspace.
Shifreen's sculptures are made with wood, fabric, scrim and cloth and have the look of science fiction, elongated objects existing and yet not belonging to our space.
The three shows at the TNC Gallery, the large interior space at Theater for the new City, a newly renovated complex on the Lower East Side, are the only recent retrospective of his work in both painting and scultpure.
The last show is new work on wood and canvas entirely in crayon.
He starting working in crayon and investigated the properties and history of the medium while curating a traveling exhibition that was called the "Crayon Show". His work are Zen-like meditations on nature and every walk of human enterprise. His pastels are struggling ton get out of the figurative grid that crahyon tradition would have them frozen.
My particular favorites were the those that completely abandoned figuration and became a Pollockian rain of pattern and drips that produce the image. Although one could say his work is highly modern, in then best sense of that term, there is a fine thread that connects Shifreen's work with masters of bygone ages.This sense of historicism is his power.
Gowanus Guerrillas/Kay Larson/6/8/81/New York Magazine
By all reckoning it was the art party of the season, If you discount tje opening of P.S.1's "New York/New Wave show, which was so much of a party as an endurance session. On Opening day (May 16th) about 3000 oglers jammed into the third floor of a nineteenth century munitions factory at 230 3rd St Brooklyn for the art performances and rock bands that entertained for the kickoff of Gowanus Memorial Artyard Monumental Show. since the Gowanus Canal is a chemical laced Brooklyn canal noted for it's tendency to bubble at the height of the summer, the local terrain is a perfect metaphor for the exhibition.
The three perpetrators-P.Michael Keene, George Moore and Frank Shifreen-call their overhaul of the munitions factory "creative rehabilitation". From the look of the show ,it's not clear who is getting the most rehabilitating, the building , the exhibitors or the organizers. Shifreen has a studio on the premises and the "artyard" ,( it was moved form the yard to his studio after an argument with the landlord) , consists of the largest of three rooms
By now it looks like the inside of the spaceship in Aliens. A hundred odd art creations hang on the walls, spread out on the floor, encroach on your ankles.
The "Monumental show" is clearly this years event. To have an even a year is something we have come to expect. It often has to do with
young, often disaffected, always energy efficient collection of artists who, with raw determination and street smarts, can put up what curators fear to tread upon. Last year a different Bunch organized the" Times Square"Show which was a compendium of guerrilla art actions housed in a cleaned upped strip joint in the porno district, an identification with then lowly that was quite intentional.. This year the Gowanus is somewhat more focused. Mike Keane is the man in charge at des refuses, the gallery housed at Westbeth Complex: always on the lookout for exhibitors, he saw Shifreens large sculptures and came up with the idea of doing a show that could hold "monumental " artworks on a scale that is becoming increasingly scarce in Manhattan, where the price of real estate is forcing artist to work in bathrooms and broom closets. The "Monumental Show" is in some ways a testimony to the will of artists to endure.
Guerrilla Actions have increasingly become the measure of the new generation., though the phrase "des refuses" should remind us that other eras had their rebellions. Many of the groups now hallowed by history were just boisterous young punks out to make a name for themselves: the hangers-on at the Cabaret Voltaire adn Le Chat Noir , the Expressionists, the tear-it-all-down , the Futurists, with their symbol-banging performances, and their pompous declaratives. Until art becomes pricey, it is usually pugnacious. The presence of hallowed artists such as Carl Andre and Nancy Holt serves us to remind that they themselves began like this, especially since their pieces- a thin line of rusty metal by Andre, a set of round mirrors on the floor of a smokestack, by Holt, were indistinguishable from the melange.
The essence of such a show is fast action. you move in, , make an artwork on site, and get out clean, hoping to have enough money left over to buy dinner. Parts of the Memorial Artyard remind me of the magic shows we used to put on in the backyard when we were kids. We would pel grapes , blindfold our guests, shove their hands in the bowland tell them it held witches eyeballs. In this category are such curiosities as Dulio Pieris giant cardboard housefly and David Channons tie-dyed inflatable silk shroud of a spinning Jupiter and satellite moons.
The best of the bunch was Don Jacobson's "painting", a cardboard and detritus construction of squiggles and glitter that clearly expressed the artist's opinion about what a Frank Stella painting would look like if you animated its parts. The zigs move one way, the zags go the other, and a tumbler turns over and over, making rude clinking noises.
Aside from such tours de farce, the work that best seized its opportunities tended to be political. Artist strike forces are indifferent to museum or trustee sanctions; the freedom from "good taste" is the freedom to say anything you want. Joe Lewis did a scalding homage to Bobby Sands, the dead IRA hunger-striker. One sits on a paint-spattered chair before a handsomely decorated door-window, looking through to a set of frosted-glass panes that bang in the breeze like mournful chimes. The panes list points of devastation: Bombay. Hiroshima, the South Bronx. On the floor beneath, the name "Bobby" is written in red on a pile of sand; one could erase it with a single gesture
Paulette Nenner's pathos-ridden plea "Crucified Coyote”, a plea on behalf of wild creatures, installed last fall in the Arsenal Gallery at the Central Park Zoo, and then censored by Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis; it wound up in Gowanus, the stopping place for "des refuses" of all kinds. Komar and Melamid fared less well; two Russian émigrés who lost their party sanction when they quit Socialist Realism in favor of American-inspired conceptualism, the pair did a bitterly funny, if excessively abstracted, piece of satire by painting Hitler before blood-red draperies, in good official-portrait style, linking him aesthetically with Stalin, and Socialist Realism with dictatorship. The Jewish Defense League missed the gibe. The painting has been knifed through the heart, and JDL members have threatened the artists, their gallery, and the show's organizers.
The JDL attacked the wrong piece. Far more distressingly Hitlerian was the installation by TODT, an organization that covered the walls of the rooms around the elevator shaft with ominous, gray-painted science-lab apparatus and vivisected bits of protoplasm; amid eerie rumblings, you walk on things that squelch. As a bit of guerrilla emotionalism, TODT's installation is the most horrific in the show; as a bit of Teutonic death wish, it falls far behind Joseph Beuys.
"Arcane Art Scientism" is what the show's co-conspirators called TODT as they guided me around the artyard; thinking up your own labels and applying a new one on every artwork is half the fun, and very anti-art-historical. Other tags we came up with included "Red Hook Expressionism," "Funk Neo-Classicism." "Monumental Expressionist Allegory." The common denominator was expressionism. Does it mean something? Arc we in another let-it-all-hang-out era? Yes, and peeled grapes are really witches' eyeballs too. Guerrilla actions are transient by nature; their other function-aside from the thrill of it all-is to add another line on a new kind of curriculum vitae. One that might list the Times Square Show, the P.S. 1 show, a stint at ABC No Rio, another at Fashion Moda in the South Bronx. The real importance of an event like the "Monumental Show" is as access for the disaffected. Don't underestimate the power of that idea. From the Expressionists of the twenties and thirties to the expressionists of today, artists have always gotten together to combat the indifference of the majority-76.5 million of whom, as the Gowanus video program's catalogue points out, watch Dallas every week.
(To get to the Gowanus: Take the F
train to Carroll Street, or the RR to
Union Street, in Brooklyn; then walk.
Enter through the yellow door, and go to
the third floor.
This is a chapter from The Fine Artists Guide to Marketing and Self Promotion by Julius Vitali 2nd Ed published in 2003 by Allworth Press, New York
Frank Shifreen has had such a colorful art career that a whole chapter could be written about his achievements. He is an artist-writer working in painting, sculpture, digital photography, scenic and graphic design, a curator, and a genius of artist-organized events. The way in which he operates provides a textbook case for understanding how to realize the myriad possibilities of sponsoring artist-organized projects. He uses a unique combination of guerrilla tactics and sound business practices.
Over the years, he has had thirty-seven solo shows, some of them in such prestigious New York City galleries as Scott Pfaffman, Enigma, New Math, and Theatre for a New City.
International exhibitions of his work have been in Gallerie Ostien, Germany; African Cultural Center, Senegal; and Gallerie di Collosseo, Italy. Additionally, he has exhibited in more than two hundred group shows and has work in the collections of museums and corporations including the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco City Museum, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Vassar College, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Citibank. Reproductions of his work have appeared
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