About
Robert Kipniss (born Brooklyn, New York, 1931) is an award-winning American painter and printmaker whose work has been shown in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide since 1951. He is a Royal Academician, an elected member of the National Academy of Design, New York, and holds two honorary doctorates. His work is held by more than eighty-eight museums and other institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and many others.
Statement
To printmaking I bring the best of what I learn drawing and painting: the most satisfying compositions, the better insights, the caught moments of my most intense emotions. These I use as starting points for prints, as if in printmaking a higher, more complicated resolution can be attained, and especially in black and white, a sense of irrefutability...I am most comfortable working with tone to discover form, and with light to find atmosphere. It is this experience of quiet intensity that I explore, sometimes with an edginess that borders on the surreal. Work is, after all, an odyssey, and I have no concern about where it will lead, being content to discover my path as I pursue it.”
Excerpted from Robert Kipniss, “Printmaking Experiences: Robert Kipniss Writes About His Work” in Printmaking Today, volume 5, number 1 (Spring 1996), pages 8 and 10.