Spring 1985: SE[E]: Collages by Irwin Kremen, an exhibition organized by The Brooklyn Museum of thirty-one works by the North Carolina artist spanning the years 1975 through 1984, will be on view in the small print gallery from March 15 through May 13, 1985.
Kremen’s collages are intimate, mystical and allusive. Working primarily with weathered papers and fragments of painted canvas which he peels and tears from walls, the artist forms his collages through a tortuous process of assembling and re-assembling the components, cutting and tearing, until he has resolved all elements of the composition. Although most of the works are closely keyed in color values, some contain startling juxtapositions in which strong colors achieve an unexpected yet seemingly inevitable complement.
The works do not have any “meaning” in the traditional sense, nor do the titles in any way explicate them or guide the viewer. Kremen stated his viewpoint in a 1979 lecture at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution:
In the way I know it, a collage is its own content always. That content is again a unity, at once of being and meaning, because, for one, it refers to nothing beyond itself; and for another, the cohesive sentience of the experienced image is not separable from the singular feeling that it arouses. All that a collage is and all that it means is given in its phenominal immediacy, utterly expressed therein yet as utterly ineffable.After its venue at The Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; and the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1985, 003.
