Marylyn Dintenfass

Art critic Meredith Mendelsohn writes, “Dintenfass uses luscious colors, repetitive forms, and a gestural intensity that combines Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.” [4]

Dintenfass often works with oil paint on wooden panels fragmented into parts of a grid. "After completing a painting," writes curator and critic Lilly Wei in a study of Dintenfass' work, "Dintenfass literally takes it apart, treating each panel as a discrete entity, exchanging panels between works in an aesthetic mix and match as she searches for interactions and relationships of color and form that satisfy her sense of visual excitement, sparked by the frisson of the dissonant." [5] In an interview with critic Irving Sandler, Dintenfass speaks of the grid as a necessary, formal restraint for the passion of the gestural marks it contains.[6] Joyce Robinson illuminates; “Dintenfass is at heart, though, a painter, and the grid, with its reference to and notion of modular parts, has remained central to her artistic enterprise, functioning as a kind of Apollonian matrix holding in check the exuberant, vividly colored abstractions of this essentially Dionysian artist.” [7]

Lilly Wei adds, "Ultimately, however, Dintenfass is more sensualist than theorist, and her paintings owe much of their allure to their materiality and the dazzle of color. Her array of ripe, radiant, saturated hues—a palette of gorgeous diversity—can be silkily smooth and nuanced; boldly exuberant; or edgily, feverishly discordant."[5]

The artist's abstract imagery usually appears in her work as various forms of stripes or circles arranged across translucent layers of alternating matte and high gloss textures.[5] In a conversation with gallery owner, John Driscoll, Dintenfass likens these symbols to language that predates the written word, saying her "work relates to communication through the visceral channel." Rooted in autobiography, the artist's paintings also examine the contrast between what she calls the “micro” and the “macro.” At times the shapes simultaneously resemble cells under a microscope and visions of the cosmos.[6] Dintenfass' themes explore the dualities of everyday pleasures; depending on the focus of a series, her symbols might conjure characters, candies, car wheels, or paint itself.[2]

Although known for her paintings, Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural installations. Her innovative use of mixed media (ceramics, epoxies, wax, pigments, steel, lead, wood, etc.) transformed understanding of what a “ceramic” work of art could be and firmly fixed her position and influence among a generation of mixed media artists expanding the traditional definitions and boundaries of object and materials to create modern art. The results came as architectural reliefs and installation sculptures unique to her organic but structural personal style. Similar to her paintings, Dintenfass developed a modular language of symbols, amalgams of line and curve, which she would combine to create detailed pictographic languages all her own, what she has called “organic alphabets.” As Ted Castle relates, “Ideas are furtive elements, stolen from the matrix, so as to be reformed by human genius into something unforeseen—a poem, a painting, a game of dominoes, a television set, a brick, a tile, a cup. Marylyn Dintenfass is a master of the transformation of ideas into palpable form.”[8]

Dintenfass has also been commissioned to create many large-scale installations, including works for the State of Connecticut Superior Courthouse; the Port Authority of NY 42nd Street Bus Terminal; IBM in Atlanta, Charlotte, and San Jose; The Baltimore Federal Financial Building; Ben Gurion University, Israel; Tagimi Middle School, Japan; and her 2010 project (and largest project to date) in Ft Myers, Florida entitled “Parallel Park.”[9]

"Parallel Park" is a site-specific artwork for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center's Parking Garage encompassing 30,000 square feet (2,800 m²). Dintenfass's images were enlarged to 10 times their original size employing specialized digitizing software resulting in 23 images, each 33 feet (10 m) high x 23 feet (7.0 m) wide and commercially printed with archival ink on Kevlar fabric and installed on all four facades of the parking structure. Each panel transforms the perimeter of the structure, creating a progression of changing images and colorful patterns, all of which are key elements represented in Dintenfass's paintings and drawings. These images and patterns recall architectural friezes, mosaics, and frescoes of the ancient, medieval and Renaissance artists as well as works by early modern artists such as the Synchromists and the Italian Futurists.[10]