"Carta Series # 45, Paper Imbeds" Experimental Printmaking Wall Sculpture by Harold Paris

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"Carta Series # 45, Paper Imbeds" Experimental Printmaking Wall Sculpture

Handmade paper sculpture by Harold Paris (American, 1925-1979). This piece … Read more "Carta Series # 45, Paper Imbeds" Experimental Printmaking Wall Sculpture

Handmade paper sculpture by Harold Paris (American, 1925-1979). This piece exemplifies post-minimalist and experimental printmaking aesthetics, blending handmade paper with sculptural elements. Its rough, irregular edges, embedded fibers, and subtle pigment traces create a highly tactile surface, emphasizing materiality and texture. The layered, organic composition, featuring a grayish protrusion at the top, evokes Arte Povera and process art influences, where the raw, imperfect quality of paper becomes the focus.

Signed and dated "Harold Paris 75" in the lower right corner.
Presented in a plexiglass display box, mounted on a fabric-covered backing board.
Framing label affixed to verso.
Box size: 18.5"H x 16.25"W
Sculpture size: 11.5"H x 10"W (approx.)

Harold Paris produced imagery from diverse and innovative media. Born in Long Island in 1925, he had much creative influence from childhood. As a youth Paris was allowed to work behind the scenes applying makeup at the Yiddish theatre where his father was an actor. This early dramatic influence remained with the artist, showing up later in his personality, and the subject matter and inventive bent of his creativity.

Paris studied in America and Europe but remained an outsider, eschewing the art centers as well as the movements. He studied briefly at Atelier 17 and the Creative Lithographic Workshop in New York. Awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship, he applied these monies to realizing goals in graphics, painting and casting. He lived in Madrid while guest instructing at the Academia de San Fernando, and in Munich while studying casting at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst.

As a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, the Armed Forces newspaper during World War II, Paris witnessed the Nazi death camps at Buchenwald and began his Buchenwald series of graphics in 1945. Profoundly affected, he expressed his personal torment with Semitic references in his imagery and titles. However, the iconography is so personal that it defies categorization.

Paris moved to California between 1960-1961. At the age of 35, he became Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and was promoted to full Professor in 1972. During these seminal years he continued to explore the new medium of plastic and expand upon the use of ceramics by developing means to strengthen and support ceramic walls and rooms. He co-founded a bronze foundry in Berkeley and developed techniques of welding and casting, thought impossible by others.

Paris died as recognition of his art was just being realized.

He is represented in the Art Institute of Chicago, Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Judah L. Magnus Museum, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art New York, National Gallery of Art, Oakland Museum, Philadelphia Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. See less