Collection: Robert Kipniss - Prints

"One thing I have most wonderfully learned is that the greatest reward for making art is making art. Instinctively I knew that painting and exhibiting were the only essentials I needed, and whatever difficulties I encountered along my path, there was always the reassurance of working and learning. 

          I was working and showing right from the start, and it never occurred to me to wonder if I would be successful or not. In the beginning, it was very challenging, mostly because there was no sure way to do it, no rules, no guideposts. For about ten years my painting was lyrical, energetic, filled with bright color, and charged with exuberance. At the same time, the poetry I was writing was dark, angry, and often painful to create. 

          When I stopped writing in the early 1960s, my paintings took on the characteristics of my poetry and became infused with anger, a dark monochromatic palette, gravitas, and occasionally slightly surreal themes. It was only after a few years when my lyricism began to re-surface and meld with the darkness. This was the beginning of my mature style...my life as an artist continues to be a passionate adventure. Every day I learn more about the constellations of feelings and thoughts I derive from the simple act of seeing. The life of an artist is about the art. I have lived my life as I dreamed of doing when I was a young man." Robert Kipniss

Robert Kipniss, painter and printmaker, was born in New York City in 1931. Kipniss studied at the Art Students League in 1947, Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, 1948-50, and the University of Iowa, receiving a BA degree in English literature in 1952, and an MFA in painting and art history in 1954.

In his career, Robert Kipniss has had over 200 One-man Shows since the first in New York in 1951. Recent Group Shows include; the Royal Academy, London, Royal Academy Summer Show, 2001, The British Museum, London, Recent Acquisitions, 2000 and the National Academy of Design, New York, Treasures Revealed: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Works on Paper, 1999. An exhibition of his work, Seen in Solitude: Robert Kipniss Prints from the James F. White Collection, was selected to reopen the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2006.

Robert Kipniss is represented in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The British Museum, London, the Albertina, Vienna, Austria, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London (diploma piece); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Morgan Library, New York, among others.

He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1980, and to the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, London in 1998.  He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of American Graphic Artists and The Artists Fellowship.  He has also received the Speicher-Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as Honorary Doctorates from Wittenberg University and Illinois College.

Robert Kipiss is represented in depth at ebo Gallery.  Please contact the Gallery to inquire about additional works.