Adja Yunkers, Mixed Media Collage Oil Painting Latvian American Modernist Artist Adja Yunkers, 1973

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Adja Yunkers, Latvian/American, 1900-1983. 1973 Mixed media collage painting with applied threads on canvas, Titled "Collage #67". Initialed "A. Y." … Read more Adja Yunkers, Latvian/American, 1900-1983. 1973 Mixed media collage painting with applied threads on canvas, Titled "Collage #67". Initialed "A. Y." and dated "'73" lower left, additionally hand signed "Adja Yunkers" with title and date verso. Dimensions: Image 30 x 40" high, in a painted softwood shadowbox frame with minor wear, 32 x 42" high overall. Adja Yunkers (born Adolf Eduard Vilhelm Junker; 1900–1983) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. on July 15, 1900, in Riga, Russia (now Latvia). He studied art in Petrograd (then Leningrad now St Petersburg), but from 1917 to 1919 his schooling was interrupted by military service in the Russian army. Yunkers soon left Russia for Europe and traveled extensively for the next two decades, He studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris, and London. He lived in Paris for 14 years, and then moved to Stockholm in 1939. In Stockholm, he published and edited the arts magazines ARS magazine and Creation magazine,settling for long periods in Cuba, France, and Germany. During much of his early career, Yunkers was active in political as well as artistic movements. At times his political investments even outweighed his commitment to his art, and in 1936 he moved to Spain to fight in its civil war. When the war ended in 1939, he moved to Stockholm and began to focus on art making again. He became associated with the Swedish Surrealists and published three journals devoted to art and politics. These handcrafted publications signaled a strong interest in printmaking, and in the 1940s he made many woodblock prints depicting distorted objects and figural compositions that demonstrate the influence of German Expressionism on his work. In 1947, Yunkers moved to New York and began to teach at the New School for Social Research. After four tumultuous marriages, he married one of his former students from the New School, Dore Ashton, in 1952. Ashton became an art critic for the New York Times in 1955, and through her, Yunkers was introduced to the Abstract Expressionist artists who made New York the home of Abstract Expressionism. He began drawing with pastel directly on canvas, resulting in large-scale works that recall Color Field painting in their emphasis on the materiality of color. Expanding on this impulse, Yunkers's later work made extensive use of negative space, collage, and minimalist monochrome. The influence of Minimalism in this more reduced aesthetic is clear, and his canvases became more object-like. Both printmaking and bookmaking were central to Yunkers's oeuvre. He founded the Rio Grande Workshop in New Mexico (where he also taught) in 1949, publishing an entirely handmade art magazine called Prints in the Desert. In 1969 he illustrated a limited-edition book by the poet Octavio Paz, a collaboration that sparked both a friendship and a number of additional illustrated books in the years to come. Yunkers also produced two large public works on commission: A Human Condition (1966), a mural for Syracuse University, and a tapestry produced for Stony Brook University (1968), both in New York. Yunkers had his first solo exhibition in 1921 at the Maria Kunde Galerie, Hamburg, Germany. Later that same year, he was part of a group show featuring Eastern European and Russian artists, including Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, and Vasily Kandinsky, held in Hannover, Germany. During the 1950s he primarily worked in color woodcuts, introducing brushwork into the genre. In 1960, he began producing lithographs. He produced two important series of lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles―Salt (five lithographs) and Skies of Venice (ten lithographs) shown at Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York He was included in an exhibition organized by the Print Council of America entitled American Prints Today. A snapshot of the state of American printmaking at the time of the exhibition. Among the many featured artists were Josef Albers, Grace Hartigan, Jasper Johns, Ynez Johnston, and Adja Yunkers. He showed at Peter Rose gallery alongside Antoni Tàpies, Clement Meadmore, Esteban Vicente, Larry Rivers, Larry Zox, Lynn Chadwick, Robert Motherwell and Victor Vasarely. He showed at Andre Emmerich who represented Color Field painters Morris, Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler joined soon after. The gallery's reputation as one of the earliest and most important promoters of Color Field painters was launched. In addition to Color Field painters, the gallery represented, among others, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Milton Avery, Herbert Ferber, Sam Francis, John Graham, Al Held, David Hockney, Hans Hofmann, John Hoyland, Judy Pfaff, Miriam Schapiro, and Anne Truitt. He exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, with retrospectives at the Baltimore Museum of Art (1960); Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City (1968); Museo de arte moderno, Bosque de Chapultepec, Instituto nacional de bellas artes, Mexico City (1975); and Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, Hempstead, New York (1984). In 1967, the Brooklyn Museum presented a retrospective devoted entirely to his prints. Permanent collections: Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida Brooklyn Museum, New York City Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Guggenheim Museum, New York Hamburg Kunsthalle, Germany Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana Museo Pedro Coronel, Zacatecas, México Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art, New York City National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Seattle Art Museum Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Illinois Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Stockholm National Gallery, Sweden Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Victoria and Albert Museum, London Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Chile See less