- Fine Art Represented by Design-Trade David Sutherland Showroom –
Los Angeles, CA—January 26, 2005 A striking selection of original art by American Modernist Sam Glankoff can be seen in an unexpected setting, the new David Sutherland Showroom in the renowned Pacific Design Center. Through October 2005, The David Sutherland Showroom will be the exclusive representative of this body of work on the west coast.
"Art is an integral part of interiors, and today's designers are being called on by their clients to consult on art, its history, value, etc.," said David Sutherland, president of David Sutherland Showroom and avid art collector himself. "Our core business is providing unique furniture and furnishing resources to the high end design community, but when I stumbled across the American Modernist work of Sam Glankoff, I knew l had something truly unique to offer my contemporary designers in Los Angeles. I knew I had to bring his work out of retirement."
Sam Glankoff lived and worked in obscurity though all the major periods of American Modernism. At the end of his life, Mr. Glankoff produced an unusual and prolific output of woodcuts and large, multi-panel paintings on Japanese paper. He agreed to his first solo gallery exhibition in 1982 at the age of 87, and died months later. Although his reclusive personality helped obscure his art to all but a few close associates until after his death, art critics had written about his work for decades. Today, this work can be found in permanent public collections including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
"This is an elegant and sophisticated body of work. It is emotive, expressive and profoundly spiritual. It takes a sensitive eye to recognize what's here and David Sutherland grasped it immediately," said Wendy Snyder, director and archivist of the Sam Glankoff Collection. "Glankoff was a visionary; David was equally visionary in responding to the power of Glankoff's pure and elemental shapes."
Mr. Glankoff's work has been incorporated into the Los Angeles showroom's furniture/furnishing vignettes recently created by Seattle-based designer Terry Hunziker.
About David Sutherland Showroom:
David Sutherland Showroom is a full-service, multi-line collection of the finest furniture, fabric and accessories from around the world. For more than 25 years, David Sutherland's showrooms have reflected his talent for providing the right resources to the right client by cultivating relationships with designers, architects and manufacturers.
About Sam Glankoff:
Sam Glankoff was born in New York City in 1894. He was invited to exhibit his paintings and woodcuts in the group show at the Whitney Studio Club from 1922 to 1928. For two decades he continued to paint on canvas, yet he found the woodcut medium offered him a greater opportunity to work privately and self-sufficiently. His representational woodcuts of the 1920s and 1930s inspired by German Expressionism, evolved into abstract collage-monotypes and later into large-scale, luminous mono-paintings (1970-1982) in water-soluble ink and casein.
Glankoff dedicated himself to art as an entirely personal means of expression. Throughout his life, he eschewed public exposure and declined to participate in gallery and museum exhibitions so he was not well known in his lifetime. Today, his substantial and mature body of work speaks to artists, collectors and art lovers, with a powerful, emotional energy and formal elegance that are resonant and timeless.
About the body of work:
The seventeen pieces in this selection from the Sam Glankoff collection span the years from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. These works offer good examples of Glankoff's personal iconography, reflecting his interest in the human figure and his fascination with the primordial universal form of the circle.
