Sam Glankoff
Knoedler
Largely self-taught, Sam Glankoff (1894-1982) had made his living variously as a book illustrator, comic-strip artist, and designer of stuffed animals, pursuing his work as a "serious" artist in almost total isolation and obscurity. But in the early '70s Glankoff began devoting himself full time to his art, using an innovative technique - part printing and part painting - of his own invention to produce haunting abstractions. His first solo exhibition, in 1981, six months before his death, at age 87, was greeted with much acclaim. This show of eleven of these so-called "print-paintings" provided an excellent overview of this last and astonishingly productive decade of his life.
Like many of the Abstract Expressionists, with whom he is often and justifiably compared, Glankoff was drawn to the expressive power of ancient writing and primitive symbols. A number of his works consist of circles - haloed, elongated, or intersected by curves and lines - that hover mysteriously against a colored ground. Others suggest a human presence. In an untitled work from 1975, abstracted arms, legs, and heads appear locked in a joyous Matisse-like dance, floating on a sea of green.
Inevitably, the visual impact of these works owes much to Glankoff's process: a unique (and still imperfectly understood) method of transfer printing in which forms build up through successive printings, composted of different-colored inks applied sequentially to the same plate. The resulting imaeg, emerging from layers of encrusted, semiopaque pigment, appears as something that has accreted over time - ancient but still miraculously luminous.
