Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur
Joyce and Edward Linde Gallery
March 28 – May 25, 1998
Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur is the first retrospective exhibition devoted to this nationally-known artist's nature imagery. Co-organized by the DeCordova Museum and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur includes over 40 artworks dating from the late 1950s to the present. It explores, in depth, the formal relationship between Mazur's work in paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as the transformation of his art over the years from realism to abstraction. Mazur's art has ranged from psychological studies of the insane to explorations of the natural world.
Branching illustrates the shift in the artist's approach to nature, from depictions based on direct observation to the more atmospheric, emotional representations of nature filtered through memory. The metaphor of branching refers to both the subject and style of Mazur's art and to the visual relationship between the exterior forms of nature and the interior structures of the human body. Mazur's most recent landscapes, inspired by ancient Chinese landscape paintings, are his most lyrical and contemplative to date.
Mazur's art is usually created in thematic series with multiple variants in different media. The landscapes often depict scenes near the artist's two studios in Cambridge and Provincetown, Massachusetts, ranging from close up studies of a particular tree or plant form to more all-encompassing views that portray a lakefront or street scene.
Michael Mazur is one of Massachusetts's best-known artists and his work is exhibited and collected nationally. The DeCordova Museum has collected and exhibited Mazur's work since the late 1960s. He received degrees from Amherst College and Yale University, and his lived in Cambridge since 1972.
Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur is accompanied by a 52 page, illustrated catalogue with essays by co-curators Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Director of Curatorial Affairs of the DeCordova Museum, and Susan Danly, Curator of American Art at the Mead Art Museum, and an Introduction by Robert Pinsky, the nation's poet laureate. Funding for the exhibition and catalogue were generously provided by The Richard Florsheim Art Fund and the Amherst College Reunion Class of 1957.
