File Under: d

Greg Drasler was born in Waukegan, Illinois in 1952. He received a B.F.A. in 1980 and an M.F.A. in 1983 from the University of Illinois in Champaign. His paintings have been shown in New York, San Francisco, Newark, New Jersey, and Chicago and are included in several private and public collections. Drasler received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993. His quasi-Surrealist work, which often places oversize utilitarian objects and figures engaged in mundane tasks in forbidding or elusive landscapes, probes the netherworld between memory and dream.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

www.drasler.com/

James Drake was born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1946, and lived in Guatemala from 1955 to 1959.  He received a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.  Drake has exhibited widely, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California, and the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, former Yugoslavia.  In 1989 he received a Southeast Center for Contemporary Art Award in the Visual Arts and A National Endowment for the Arts Grant and Travel Fellowship.  His work can be found in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Birmingham Museum of Fine Art, Alabama, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  Known primarily as a sculptor, Drake is also an accomplished painter, draftsman, and printmaker.  In the late 1970s he began a series of monochromatic, theme-based room installations in cast metals, including Tattoo Parlor and The Tool Room, which play with the viewer’s notion of reality.  By the mid-1980s he had turned his attention to the conflicts and paradoxes of life along the Texas-Mexico border.  Often confrontational and foreboding, his haunting images explore the dynamics of aggression in social exchange in the tradition of Goya, Géricault, and Rivera.  Drake uses a wide array of symbols – including weapons, trophies, flowers, and snakes – to convey moral and spiritual struggle, mixing traditional artists’ materials with industrial products and charred refuse to lend a sense of passion and physical force to his works.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

www.jamesdrake.net/index.html

Robert Dobson was born in 1950. He received his B.A from the University of Arizona in 1972. Dobson is known for his basket-weaving skills and hopes to honor the tradition and craft of basket making, while also expanding its influence. By gathering materials from the world around him, Dobson has integrated urban and industrial materials into a rural, natural skill. He speaks of the importance of improvisation and creativity as a way of life, and wants to utilize baskets as a metaphor for culture and heart. Robert Dobson has participated in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, and continues publishing works regarding the importance of the tradition of craft, especially basket making.

Jim Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935.  He served as a bridge between Pop art and a new generation of figurative expressionism, and continues to refine his technical virtuosity in paintings, sculptures, drawings and graphics.  From 1953 to 1955 he studied at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Boston Museum School, Massachusetts, and in 1957 he received his B.F.A. from the University of Ohio.  In 1959 he exhibited with Claes Oldenburg at the Judson Gallery, his first New York show.  In 1964 Dine was included in the Venice Biennale.  The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York gave Dine his first retrospective in 1970 when he was only 35, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a print retrospective in 1978.  In 1980 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.  Dine developed a love of tools at his family’s hardware store, and they have remained a favorite subject throughout his career.  In recent years he has added skulls, trees, gates, and the torso of Venus to his lexicon of images, and his work has been marked by a heightened sense of drama and sensual gestural surfaces.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Julius Deutschbauer was born in 1961 in Klagenfurt, Austria. He was trained in draughtsmanship and surveying, and went on to study literature, philosophy and linguistics. Some of his main focus was put on philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Carnap, and Quine. He researched their writings mostly regarding the relationship between word and object. After moving to Vienna in 1983, Deutschbauer developed the first three-dimensional representation of his literary ideas.

Wim Delvoye was born in Werwick, Belgium, in 1965. His sculptures have been included in the 1990 Venice Biennale, as well as in several collections in Holland, Belgium, and New York. He has had solo shows throughout the world, including in France, Switzerland and the United States in 2017. Delvoye's mix-media sculptures reflect a witty blend of Dada and Surrealist sensibilities. By juxtaposing everyday, utilitarian objects with appropriated genre scenes from the past, Delvoye questions notions of identity, good taste, and functionality within a historic context.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

www.wimdelvoye.be/

Willem de Looper was born on October 30, 1932 in the Hague and died in 2009. He received a B.A. from American University after immigrating to Washington D.C. in 1950. After his graduation from American, de Looper joined the U.S. Army and served in Germany. After returning to the U.S., de Looper became a part of the second-generation of the Washington Color School because of his distinct painting process. He also became the chief curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.

Georgia Deal was born in New York City in 1953. She completed a B.A. in fine arts in 1975 at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg and an M.F.A. in printmaking at the University of Georgia in Athens in 1977. Known as a master printmaker and papermaker, Deal has also been a visiting artist and has taught at numerous universities on the East Coast and abroad. She has exhibited widely, and her work can be found in several collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Munson-Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, New York, and the Phillip Morris Collection. Her symbolic narratives, which often feature abstract, basketlike vessels or vortexes, mine the perennial themes of memory and anticipation, emptiness and fecundity. Her work abounds in humor and mystery, qualities that are complemented by the seductive surfaces of her handmade paper.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Dies de Jonge was born in Brouwershaven, Holland, in 1948 and completed his studies at the Art Academy in Rotterdam in 1974. He specializes in etching, wood sculpture, and design. He has exhibited in Europe, the Far East, and the United States. His work is in several public collections, including the Municipal Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, as well as many private collections in Europe and the United States. Labeled an Abstract Realist, de Jonge is fascinated by contemporary hand tools and sequential motion. He produces "portraits" that capture the tools' actions and shapes at near-life-size scale.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.