Arthur Dworin. Inquiries

About

Peter Selz, the former MoMA curator of painting and sculpture and one of Dworin’s collectors, has said that “Dworin’s paintings are endowed with an original sense of sonorous color. Abstract as they are, they bring a new sense of visual order to organic forms of nature.” 

Dworin attended the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts and received a scholarship to the Art Students League in Woodstock. After painting in Zacualpan, Mexico, he became a member of the United Scenic Artists Union, where he became skilled in a host of techniques that have been invaluable to his personal art.  While painting sets for theater and film, he used materials in an alchemical way. Often he had to make something look as if five layers of paint had peeled off a rusting surface.  But in his own painting, he literally rusts the surfaces rather than just painting them to look like rust. 

Like Kandinsky, whom he admires, Dworin improvises with forms that resonate musically with his own spiritual explorations. As he puts it, Dworin hopes that, “the spirit in these works will act as a key to awaken what is already deep within the observer, anew with each viewing, bringing a greater awareness of our inner and outer universes.”

Dworin lived and worked in Tribeca (Manhattan) until 2011, when he purchased a Pennsylvania church, where he created these works. This is his fifth solo show at Viridian.