Robert A. BirmelinFalling Figure, American Modernist Abstract Etching

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Born in Newark, New Jersey, Robert Birmelin became a professor of fine arts at Queens College in New York, and … Read more Born in Newark, New Jersey, Robert Birmelin became a professor of fine arts at Queens College in New York, and is known for paintings that magnify through texture the realism of nature.
He earned his BA in 1956 and his MFA in 1960 from Yale School of Art and Architecture and also studied at Cooper Union and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1960, he earned a Fulbright Scholarship, which took him to the Slade School of Art in London.
His work has been acquired by 40 public collections including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art and Washington’s Hirshorn Museum. Among the various art magazines and journals where articles on Mr. Birmelin’s work have appeared are Art In America, American Artists, and Art Forum. Additionally, he has received numerous grants and awards from such organizations as The American Academy in Rome, The National Endowment for the Arts, The American Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Mr. Birmelin found his principal inspiration in the streets of New York where he was fascinated by the energy and diversity of city life. His large paintings evoke movement, using focus and depth manipulations to suggest a close spatial and psychological relationship between the viewer and the world Birmelin has depicted. Hands often play an important role in these works, as exemplified by “The Twenty Dollars Bill.”

From 1993 to 2000, he became absorbed by memory, its unreliability and contradictions. These paintings are of states of mind, structured as a series of “reversible compositions,” which initially present a credible depiction of a place, and then after a moment, reveal insoluble contradictions created by contrasting opposing images of equal visual weight.

A new series of images of the life of the urban crowd was begun in 2001 and continues to the present. Many of these paintings have a sweeping sense of the choreography of masses of people in motion and reflect the tensions of contemporary urban reality.

Selected Grants and Scholarships
1960-61 U.S. Government Grant (Fulbright) for study in the United Kingdom
1961-64 The American Academy in Rome
1955 National Institute of Arts and Letters
1973 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
1976, 1982, 1990 National Endowment for the Arts
2005 The Joan Mitchell Foundation
1980, 1988, 1998, 2006 The New Jersey State Council on the Arts

Selected Public Collections
Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Hirschorn Museum, Washington, DC
Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
The Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY
The Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Nagoaka, Japan
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
National Academy of Design, New York, NY
New York Historical Society, New York, NY
New York Public Library, New York, NY
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY See less