NEW YORK, NEW YORK, MAY 20, 2017 – Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Mike Solomon: Immediate Splendor” featuring nineteen recent paintings and works on paper. The exhibition opens with a reception on Thursday, June 1, 2017 from 6 to 8 pm and will continue through July 8, 2017. Mike Solomon is […]
For a show called “Surf’s Up” organized by the late great curator, John McWhinnie (The exhibition was the first of its kind in New York, dedicated to surf culture.) Robert Long’s review, referring to my small wax and wire wave sculptures
For the intellect conceives not save limited things. Verily bound by the realm of limitations, men are unable to gaze upon things simultaneously in their manifold aspects….. No one can recognize the truth of the Middle Way between
Since I was 11 and got my first surfboard, surfing was the central activity in my life and so when I started painting at about 14, naturally I painted scenes related to surfing and to waves. My first show was with a surf buddy
In the mid 90s after doing lots of works on paper, I wanted to make larger works. This provided a challenge because I could not find the kind of paper I needed in a larger size. I wanted to continue working with the techniques
As a teenager I remember being taught that making art was a journey, a life-long ramble through all visualizations and there was no telling where one might go. One moves through things, though ideas, styles
The meaning that a material can bring to the making of an artwork first entered my consciousness through the work of Joseph Beuys. I went to that first Guggenheim show in ‘79 and attended the contentious lecture
This is a rather long text. However, it has some art history that you might find interesting. & you can see the information about each work by scrolling over the image with the cursor and can enlarge images
In ‘89 I finished my MFA at Hunter. We decided to move out to Long Island, to the Hamptons. We had lived there in the early ‘80s and I had lived there during my formative years as well, so it was a kind of symbolic “return
In 1987 while living and working in New York I began to notice how subway platform advertisements had a connection to my assembled print images. By the late ‘80s I had come to the realization that assemblage
Using picture postcards for my assemblages, eventually I hit a point where I needed to connect to more personal imagery, as the postcard images were intended as souvenirs for tourists.
A continuation of the postcard works. These influenced by Neil William’s works he brought back from Brazil. A few spray paint on aluminum flashing works honoring High-Life music and a few other things marked
One of things that I experienced in working for John Chamberlain was the use of found object assemblage material. To be accurate, Chamberlain almost always altered his found objects before incorporating them
As you look through these images they progress chronologically from neat ones to ones with more gesture. This transition can be attributed to being around John Chamberlain. I started working as his assistant in Florida
In my first two and a half years at Creative Studies I had been exposed to most of the trends in contemporary of art. I have to credit my first girlfriend there, Lani Asher, for hipping me to many things. When I started
In 1971 when I was 15, I made a conscious choice to work in art. Growing up with the influence of my father Syd who was an abstract painter (see: Syd Solomon.com) may make my choice to be an artist seem obvious
Over the last decade or so, I have been slowly assembling a chronology of my life’s work in a database – images of paintings, drawings, sculptures, watercolors, prints and photographs. Of the number of good reasons to do this, the primary one for me, is to be able to exhume the hidden narrative my circuitous […]
