Artist: Thelma Appel
Title: Meeting Plaza
Year created: 2018
Medium: 25 color silkscreen print
Edition: 8/75
Height (inches): 26
Width (inches): 32
Depth (inches): 1
This piece is signed by the artist.
This piece is framed.
Description of piece:
Meeting Plaza, 2018 is a 25 color silkscreen on 320 Gram coventry paper with full margins and deckled edges. It is hand signed, titled, dated and numbered, and acompanied by gallery-issued Certificate of Authenticity (COA). It is an exquisite 25-color limited edition silkscreen done in collaboration with master printer Gary Lichtenstein. The work is evocative of New York's Rockefeller Center and the United Nations, but the flags are abstracted, to emphasize international unity, rather than single out any individual country. The artist explained: "I wanted to convey a city that welcomed all nationalities and all people… The flags for me are a counterpoint to the city’s geometric architecture, and their suggested movement and irregular shapes echo the organic morphology of the people below. I painted an evening sky. It is dusk. Nobody is rushing. People are conversing with each other, walking slowly or gathering in small groups enjoying a calm evening in the New York City…I, too, am one of the people converging at the 'Meeting Plaza' .
Artist bio:
Thelma is a representational and abstract painter who has been working and teaching for more than six decades. She was raised in Darjeeling, India and educated in London, England, at St. Martin’s School of Art (now Central St. Martins) and Hornsey College of Art before emigrating to the United States in the 1960s. Now in her 80s, her work is being re-discovered by a new generation of collectors and curators. Ms. Appel has been the subject of a 50 year career survey at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont curated by Mara Williams. Her work has been exhibited in numer ous venues, including the Bennington Museum, the Berkshire Museum in North Adams, Mass., the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York City, the Mattatuck Museum, the Brattleboro Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, the University of Pennsylvania Fine Arts Gallery - and seen on the A & E Television Series The Way Home. In the 1980s, she was represented by the renowned Jill Kornblee Gallery on West 57th Street, and later Fischbach Gallery, and Appel’s works were acquired by many private and public collections. She is also a long time art teacher, having taught drawing at Parsons School of Design, painting at Southern Vermont College and at the University of Connecticut. In 1974 she was awarded a YADDO Fellowship, and in 1975, Thelma Appel, along with the painter Carol Haerer, co-founded the Bennington College Summer Painting Workshop, where many distinguished painters of the day, both abstract and representational, conducted master classes. Among them were Neil Welliver, John Button, Alice Neel, Larry Poons, Friedel Dzubas, Stanley Boxer, Eliza beth Murray and Doug Ohlson – a program that continued until 1980. In 2014 Appel was awarded a solo show by the Chashama Foundation: Thelma Appel: Landscapes and Cityscapes. In 2019, the curators of the Art New York fair at Pier 94 chose works from her Times Square series of paintings for their public project exhibition space sponsored by Absolut vodka, and in the Fall of 2019 the curator of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in collaboration with Cha shama Foundation selected Appel’s. Times Square series to be exhibited in a solo show at their Project Find space – a public exhibition at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.