October 1981
"SAM GLANKOFF Print Paintings" Graham Gallery
"GLANKOFF", Catalogue Essay: Amei Wallach.
Sam Glankoff was born in 1894 in New York City. He first exhibited still life's and landscape paintings in group shows at the Whitney Studio Club. In the early 1920s he began to make woodcuts. For fifty years he kept his personal work separate from the commercial art he did to earn a living. In the 1960s he began to experiment with the process of printmaking he calls "print-paintings". He replaced the woodcut medium's traditional blocks of wood with plywood boards scaled to the Japanese rice paper he prefers. He applies several layers of color through successive impressions bringing his work closer to painting than to the traditional monotype process, and as a result he achieves a unique luminosity. By joining the panels together he is able to make very large works. Glankoff defines the technique he developed as "using a printing method to make a painting".
Throughout his life, Glankoff has shunned public exposure and declined to participate in gallery and museum exhibitions. Due to the recent interest and support of influential patrons and museum curators, Sam Glankoff's forthcoming one-man exhibition at the Graham Gallery will mark the first public presentation of his work.
For further information please contact Harriet Goss or Amy Shinn at (212) 535-5767.
1014 MADISON AVENUE (78TH STREET) NEW YORK, NY 10021 TELEPHONE 212 533-5767
