This exhibition offers a
fresh glance into the personal life and career of Chicago artist Seymour
Rosofsky, through his more than 20-year friendship and professional association
with artist, teacher, and collector Bill Moll. This association resulted
in Moll’s collection of 35 works created from the late 1950s to early 1980s,
representing Rosofsky’s artistic evolution in oils, watercolors, lithographs,
and linocuts.
Rosofsky’s early work was
associated with the group “Monster Roster,” reflecting expressive, gestural
renderings of distorted figures. That trend was inspired by the non-Western
art he and his classmates studied at the Field Museum, by German Expressionism,
and by his wartime experience.
Later on he started to develop
a personal vocabulary of fantastic, sometimes frightening, figures such
as laughing clowns, indifferent children, and menacing faces. His sources
ranged from Goya and Valasquez to his own life. In the 1970s Rosofsky concentrated
on the domestic roles of women and men. The often-caustic content portrayed
figures as cardboard cut-outs or puppets whose actions seemed predetermined. |
