Harry Koursaros, Large Pattern and Decoration Painting Abstract Expressionist Harry Koursaros P&D, 1983

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Harry Koursaros (1928-1986) Peaceable Kingdom, the Ram, 1983 Framed 34 X 45. sheet 25.5 X 37 Hand Signed Provenance: Bank … Read more Harry Koursaros (1928-1986) Peaceable Kingdom, the Ram, 1983 Framed 34 X 45. sheet 25.5 X 37 Hand Signed Provenance: Bank of Boston corporate collection. bears label verso. Harry Koursaros, Artist, painter, printmaker and filmmaker Student at Albright College class of 1950. In 1964 he came to Albright College as professor to establish an Art Department, and gained national recognition. He started as a modernist realist, later moving to Abstract Expressionism and eventually into Pattern & Decoration. He painted with metallic and iridescent pigments. In the late 1960s he began a program of "underground" films at the college. Many of these were avant-garde works from New York that included works by Andy Warhol. One of Koursaros students, Jerry Tartaglia, founded in 1974 the Berks Filmmakers, a group of cutting-edge movie makers who acquired an international reputation. He was included in numerous shows: "Discovering Color": Two Decades of Abstraction, paintings, works on paper, and prints from three pivotal art movements in America during the sixties and seventies: Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, and Minimalism. Artists include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Dan Christensen, John Grillo, Lee Krasner, and more. “Drawn From the Collection” paintings, limited edition prints and photos by such notables, among others, as Mark Tobey, Alice Baber, Rufino Tamayo and a photograph by Gordon Parks. "20/20": The Visionary Legacy of Doris Chanin Freedman. Works by Nicholas Africano, Ida Applebroog, William Baziotes, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Jime Dine, Gunther Forg, Leon Golub, April Gornik, Hans Haacke, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Komar and Melamid, Harry Koursaros, Lee Krasner, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Tom Watcke. "Artists for Kennedy" Prominent artists contributed original works to the project. Robert Rauschenberg, Leon Polk Smith, Jack Youngerman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Lowell Nesbitt and Richard Anuszkiewicz. He also showed at Andre Zarre Gallery and was included in the show Persistent Patterns in 1979 with Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff, Mary Grigoriadis, Tony Robbin and Robert Zakanitch. Zarre also showed Tony Bechara, Sonia Delaunay, Nassos Daphnis, Perle Fine, Budd Hopkins, Richard Hunt, Buffie Johnson, Harry Koursaros, Pat Lipsky, From a review by art critic Theodore Wolff, These handsome and highly provocative paintings are art, and not decoration or design. They are too alive, too stimulating, to function as either of the latter. Their all-over patterning and tightly controlled repetitive designs, while crucial to their pictorial identity, are intended to incite intellectual as well as aesthetic response, not to lull the sensibilities , as would be the case with decoration. Their precise and lovingly defined details - tiny pictographs of men, women, plants, animals, and aquatic life - make reference to classical antiquity, most especially to images found on Minoan and Cycladic pottery. Thus they add a dimension of thematic complexity and significance. The color in Koursaros's paintings is rich, generally compartmentalized, and often glowing, with the total effect being one of iridescence and spatial ambiguity. This is extremely sophisticated art. Its brilliant effects beautifully illustrate our current freedom to borrow from all previous styles - even from the often maligned decorative arts of age-old cultures. It also represents one artist's sensitive and judicious integration of such borrowings into an extraordinarily alive and ''modern'' pictorial statement. See less