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Bob Duran, Water Color, 1976

Offered by: 20cdesign

Description
Water color painting by Bob Duran, Untitled, 1976. Bob Duran studied at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts from 1960 to 1961. He moved to New York in the mid 1960s where he quickly became enmeshed in New York City’s artist community. Following his receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting in 1969 and his inclusion in the Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition that same year, the artist debuted a cycle of canvases in a solo show at Bykert Gallery in 1970.
Art critic and poet Carter Ratcliff, writing on the exhibition for Arts International, framed Duran as antithetical to “practitioners of the explicit,” or artists who follow an “art idea” until it achieves meaning. Ratcliff surmised: “What Duran understands—from the viewpoint of his intention to paint—is that meaning is always provisional; that is, it is a reflexive coming to terms with the ‘non-explicit’ in experience; and that painting is valuable, meaningful, when it invites this reflexiveness on the part of the viewer.” This receptivity to fluctuating and inconclusive meanings, this poetic capaciousness, is part of what makes Duran’s paintings inexhaustible.
Between the apex of Minimalism in the late 1960s and the emergence of Neo-Expressionism in the late 1970s, factors including programmatic injunctions against painting, the ascent of other media, and what Peter Schjeldahl characterized as an abstract-painter-led turn against the art world machinery all pushed painting to new places—sites of nuance, invention, and synthesis—as they predisposed it to historical neglect. With so much exploratory painting left critically unexplored, the legacies of the period’s most salient painters are ripe for reconsideration. One such artist who emerged in this interval, going against the grain when he pivoted from Minimalist sculpture to abstract painting, is Robert Duran.

More Information

Origin:	United States
Period:	1950-1979
Condition:	Good. Very good original. Wear consistent with age
Creation Date:	1976
Styles / Movements:	Minimalism
Dealer Reference #:	SKU00002025
Incollect Reference #:	745345