File Under: g

Fred Gutzeit was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940.  He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1959 to 1962, and Hunter College, New York, from 1977 to 1979.  He has exhibited widely and is represented in several private collections.  In the tradition of Claude Monet, he created a series of paintings in 1977 that chronicled a close-up section of sidewalk at different times of day and under various weather conditions.  Another body of work features mixed-media assemblages and installations created from discarded work gloves (which he collects himself and sometimes paints over in bright colors), mirrors, and neon, among other materials.  These idiosyncratic ensembles not only trace the artist’s creative process but also reflect the accumulated social experience of the anonymous workers who wore the gloves.

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

www.fredgutzeit.com/

Pier Gustafson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1956. He received a B.S. from Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota, in 1978, and an M.F>A. in painting from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1982. He then moved to Boston. Gustafson makes painstakingly folded paper constructions and then covers the surface with pen and ink, creating, in effect, three-dimensional drawings. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Massachusetts Artist Fellowships. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul. He began making sculpture-drawings of individual objects such as paint tubes and hammers, and then went on to create whole environments, including a crowded garage and a storeroom filled with forgotten objects.

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

Steven Guarnaccia is the chair of the Illustration Program at Parsons The New School for Design. He is a former art director of the New York Times Op-Ed page, and his illustrations have appeared in books and magazines, on greeting cards for the Museum of Modern Art, on watches for Swatch, and as murals for Disney Cruise Lines. His books include Michele De Lucchi (Corraini, 2010), The Three Little Pigs (Harry N. Abrams 2010) and Goldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Moderne (Harry N. Abrams, 2000), which introduce children to modern architecture and design. Guarnaccia is the author of Black and White (Chronicle, 2002) and co-author with Steven Heller of School Days (Abbeville, 1992) and Designing for Children (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1994). He has had solo shows in New York, Milan, and Toronto. His drawings for the exhibition Achille Castiglioni: Design! at the Museum of Modern Art were published as a book by Corraini Editore. Guarnaccia has received numerous honors from AIGA, the New York Art Directors Club, the Society of Publication Designers, and other professional organizations and was a Hallmark Fellow of the Aspen Design Conference.

Peter Grzybowski was born in Poland in 1954, and died in 2013. He received his artistic training at the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts from 1977 to 1982. He moved to the United States soon after completing his degree. A painter as well as a performance artist, Grzybowski has exhibited work in Poland, France, Germany, and the United States. His tromp l'oeil images—including an ongoing series of paintings resembling pieces of wood—are difficult to distinguish from the actual objects.

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

Red Grooms was born Charles Rogers Grooms in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1937.  An innovative painter, printmaker, filmmaker, and pioneer of “happenings,” Grooms uses fantasy, wit, and satire as ways to comment on modern life in America, especially the city and its inhabitants.  He began drawing as a child, absorbing various influences that would later inform his art – Hollywood movies, the circus, and the Tennessee State Fair.  In 1955 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but he quit after a semester.  The following year he moved to New York and attended the New School for Social Research, where he studied under the social realist painter Gregorio Prestopino.  He continued his formal training at the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, finishing at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1957.  While working as a dishwasher in Provincetown that summer, the artist was nicknamed “Red” by a co-worker.  In September 1957 he settled in New York and began to participate in “happenings” with Allan Kaprow and others.  His early paintings were mostly figure studies and portraits painted with inexpensive hardware-store enamels and tinting colors.  In 1958 he had his first exhibition at the Sun Gallery in Provincetown, and in 1959, Grooms had a show at the City Gallery in New York.  Within a few years he was increasingly involved in making sculpture and collage.  In 1962 he created his first film, Shoot the Moon, which was followed by several others, including the well-known Ruckus Manhattan (1975-76), a “sculpto-pictorama” of New York City, and Hippodrome Hardware (1972-73).  Done as a circus-style show and based on a live performance of the same name, Hippodrome Hardware pays homage to the tools used to build his grandmother’s house and the tools of the trade employed in the Hippodrome, Manhattan’s biggest theater.  In the 1960s and early 1970s Grooms developed an exaggerated, cartoonlike style, which was heightened with the use of bright, high-keyed colors, bold compositions, and everyday subjects.  This approach was also evident in his multimedia environments, in which he filled entire rooms with cutout figures and objects.  In the late 1970s he turned his attention to diverse topics ranging from sex, football, and hardware to cowboy imagery.  Today he continues to explore themes related to popular culture, striking an edgy balance between documentation and acerbic commentary.  His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective at Rutgers University Art Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1973 and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1985, both of which subsequently traveled around the country.  Grooms is represented in leading public collections.

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

Gints Grinbergs was born in 1962 and received his B.F.A. and B.A. in architecture from Rhode Island School of Design and since, has studied at Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  His sculpture has been featured at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Michael Beauchemin Gallery, Boston, and Lever House Gallery, New York, New York.  While Grinbergs works with a variety of mediums such as bronze, clay, metal, stone and wood, his preferred medium is stainless steel which has the ability to withstand the elements and corrosion – both of which are enemies of outdoor sculpture.  Welding metal spheres and partial spheres, Grinbergs creates modern structures, often making associations with galaxies and molecular structures.

gintsgrinbergs.com/

Born in 1946 in Long Beach, New York, John Grazier studied at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1968 and the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1970-71. His work was first exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1974 and has since been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, North Carolina, and the Tampa Museum. Grazier completed a large commission of multiple works for the celebrated Greyhound Bus Terminal in Washington, D.C. His work is included in the collections of the National Museum of American Art and the Library of Congress. A draftsman and a painter, Grazier executes his images meticulously in black and white with airbrush. He paints empty office buildings, houses, lunch counters, and buses; uninhabited, enigmatic scenes that are permeated by a sense of loneliness. A slightly skewed perspective emphasizes the images' abstract designs and monochromatic patterns.

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

Colin Gray was born in 1952 and grew up in Devonshire, England, and in the 1970s he moved to the United States.  His sculptures have been exhibited at galleries in California, including a one-man show at the Riverside Art Museum.  Gray began using tools in his sculpture in the early 1970s, not only because of their visually pleasing forms but also because they seem to be imbued with a physical presence.  With their curved and twisted forms, Gray’s sculptures are humorous and energetic.

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

www.colinfrasergray.com/

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1940, Guy Goodwin received a B.F.A. from Auburn University, Alabama, and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Goodwin's paintings have been exhibited in Europe and the United States, in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other museums. He creates watercolor and charcoal drawings to explore compositions and colors for his paintings. The format of his paintings derives from traditional still-life and landscape compositions with elements bluntly pared down and pieced back together in interlocking patterns. Tools and household objects are recurring themes in Goodwin's work, providing the vehicle for his investigation of space, form, texture, and color.

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

Paul Giovanopoulos was born in 1939 in Kastoria, Greece, and at age 22 became a United States citizen and resident of New York City, where he lives today. He was educated in New York at the School of Visual Arts, at the Parsons School of Design, and at the Pratt Institute. Giovanopoulos is best known for his oil paintings, which are collage-like abstractions full of references to art history and to the artists who influenced him. He also illustrates children’s books and has designed covers for at least five novels. His work has been exhibited around the world—including in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy—as well as in many prominent institutions in the United States, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. His work is in more than 50 collections, and is privately collected by such luminaries as James Cameron, Sylvester Stallone, Michael Bloomberg, and others.