Steven Sorman Those From Away, Plate Ii 1989 Reproduction Print

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This artwork titled "Those From Away, plate II" 1989, is an original hand colored linocut with collage on Fuji Handmade … Read more This artwork titled "Those From Away, plate II" 1989, is an original hand colored linocut with collage on Fuji Handmade paper by noted American artist Steven Sorman, b.1948. It is hand signed, dated and numbered 15/32 in pencil by the artist. The artwork size is 14.5 x 12 inches, framed size is 22.75 x 21.75 inches. It is custom framed in a wooden white wash frame, with fabric backing and liner. It is in excellent condition.

About the artist:
Since his debut in the early 1970s Steven Sorman has built a reputation with, openly decorative mixed-medium works. Sorman's ornamental predilections have often provoked comparisons with the sensibilities of Matisse and Motherwell, though his work displays an equally strong kinship with Rauschenberg's cooler, "flat bed" organization of pictorial space. Like his accomplished precursors, Sorman has made collage a central part of his artistic practice. In fact, until recently, Sorman's pieces were typically organized around a persistent motif of broken and overlapping technical forays, so that sections of contrasting color were played against translucent scrims, gestural marks and framed areas that often held figural silhouettes or splashed paint placed to calculated effect.

In recent years the tapestried poise of the earliest work has yielded to something more energetic, with Sorman employing wild arabesques to draw together the disparate elements of his compositions. Collaged from handmade paper, sheer drapery, gold leaf and other exotic materials, his works often exude an Oriental sumptuousness. Sorman applies paint in two distinct manners: on the one hand, he makes use of a thinned out, almost watercolor transparency that bares every splatter and much of the canvas beneath, on the other, he allows himself passages of heavily worked, al- most chalky opacity.

Filled with bio-morphic shadows and overlapping lines, this painting evokes a horizon-less inner landscape where natural forces reveal themselves with graphic certainty. Private as thought, Sorman's oil proposes a transcendent identity between life's energies, painted gestures and the trace of consciousness. One could say that Sorman's paintings have evolved from ornaments to devotional emblems; a change that bodes well for Sorman's future.

His work is housed in numerous international museums that include Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sorman won the Bush Foundation Artist's Fellowship in 1979, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Merit World Print III Award in 1980, the Rockefeller Foundation American Center Artist in Residence in Paris in 1982 and the 2nd Bhrat Bhavan International Biennial of Prints Merit Award in 1991. See less