Dina Wind: Palette Knife Paintings
On view: private virtual gallery at bridgettemayergallery.com, from November 4 – December 4, 2020
Artist Talk: Friday, November 13, 2020 at 5:30pm EST
The Bridgette Mayer Gallery is proud to present, for the first time, an exclusive virtual exhibition of sculptor Dina Wind’s (1938-2014) early palette knife paintings. The paintings are available to view online for a select group of clients and those interested in Dina Wind’s work in a private virtual gallery at bridgettemayergallery.com.
On November 13th, the Bridgette Mayer Gallery presented the latest in a series of virtual private artist talks to safely promote connectedness and art appreciation. Mayer was joined by John Wind, Dina’s son and President of the Dina Wind Art Foundation and William R. Valerio, PhD, the Patricia Van Burgh Allison Director and CEO of Woodmere Art Museum, in an interactive discussion of Dina Wind’s palette knife paintings. Though Dina was primarily a sculptor, she created a series of palette knife paintings in the late 1960s and 1970s under the tutelage of renowned art teacher and Group '55 organizer Sam Feinstein. For this event, Mayer, Wind, and Valerio discussed the influence of Feinstein, Group '55, and Abstract Expressionism on Dina Wind's early works. These palette knife paintings allude to her later explorations of space and form as a sculptor. This was a private, interactive Zoom artist talk recorded on Friday, November 13th at 5:30pm EST.
Click here to view the works discussed.
Artist Statement (written by John Wind)
Dina Wind’s studio art practice began under the tutelage of Philadelphia-born artist Sam Feinstein, during weekly classes she attended in the early 1970’s at his Chancellor Street studio. Himself a student, and later colleague of Abstract Expressionist master Hans Hoffman, Sam introduced Dina to the tenets of abstraction, to Hoffman’s famous theory of push and pull, and to working with a palette knife to apply paint to canvas in a very physical way.
She embraced the complementary color theories of her teachers as well, keeping the eye moving by contrasting oranges and blues, yellows and purples, reds and greens. She found endless innovation within this structure, and immediately embraced creating non-objective, purely abstract art. Color, form, movement, and emotion are the elements she considered with each work, and which would help define a successful painting.
Dina continued painting through the decade, a period of intense personal discovery and fulfillment as an artist capable of producing beautiful, meaningful, and powerful works of art (all while raising a family and finding her way as a recent immigrant from Israel). She eventually left Sam’s studio, looking for more freedom and growth. Two subsequent bodies of work focused on hard edge and color field painting.
By the early 1980’s, the lure of welded metal sculpture drew her undivided attention. But the dynamic texture and movement she created with palette knives and acrylic paint foreshadow her later 3-dimensional work, making Dina Wind’s Palette Knife paintings an important building block in the career of this vigorous, forward-thinking late 20th Century abstract artist.