Vivien Abrams CollensRomance of Electricity, Mixed Media Metallic Painting Woman Artist, 1982

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Vivien Abrams Collens is a mid-career abstract artist born in Cleveland, Ohio, whose current practice includes site specific installations, sculpture … Read more Vivien Abrams Collens is a mid-career abstract artist born in Cleveland, Ohio, whose current practice includes site specific installations, sculpture and painting. After graduating with a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, she studied in San Miguel de Allende Mexico for two years, receiving an MFA from Institute Allende.
Upon returning to the US, she felt out of touch with art being done by her peers, and decided she would have to live in the USA or be an expatriate artist living in another country. Renting a studio in Cleveland, she supported herself by working at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art. After achieving regional recognition for her work, relief wall constructions, and shaped / constructed painting installations, the stimulation of the NYC art world and opportunities brought her to NYC in 1977.
Her early NYC works (signed Vivien Abrams) were widely shown in NYC and elsewhere in the 70s and 80s and many are in museum and corporate collections.
Approaching the end of her childbearing years, she married, had two children and took her husband's surname. During the following years of family responsibility, Vivien continued her studio practice but agreed to few exhibition opportunities. In 2015 Vivian Collens began exhibiting again, with her “Urban Studies and City Blocks “solo exhibition at the Rockefeller Center headquarters of Gensler. Included were City Blocks, her first freestanding sculptures, along with her Urban Studies paintings from the past few years. She then began developing larger sculptures focusing on urban architecture and energy. These led to a dialogue with the environment and public sculpture. In 2017 Collens installed an 18' high sculpture for the Cary Hill Sculpture Park in Salem, NY, and completed installation of a 16"high welded aluminum commissioned sculpture for the permanent collection of the Kenner Sculpture Garden in New Orleans. Vivian Abrams Collins paintings about urban environments use multiple perspectives , geometry, pattern, color and line to evoke urban experiences of architecture and changing views as one moves through the city in subways, cars, escalators and elevators and sees the city from different vantage points. There is a synergy between her paintings and 3 dimensional works The drawings and paintings always have been springboards for various series of relief wall constructions such as this 1979 construction and more recently, sculptural installations. See less