Titled from a review by the late ARTnews critic, Melinda Wortz A Provocative Fusion of Opposites marks the first comprehensive survey of the work of Gloria Kisch. Covering 40 years and a triangle of artworld hotbeds Venice, California, SoHo and The Hamptons the principal places where Kisch has created her work over the course of five decades. Despite the fact that she has had over 200 shows on four continents, been exhibited in dozens of museums, collected and reviewed internationally, and exhibited beside such artworld luminaries as Calder, Chamberlain, Chihuly, Katz, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Ruscha and Warhol, Kisch remains a relatively unknown or underknown artist. This, unfortunately, is fairly common for women who emerged prior to the mid-1970s when Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, among others, pushed the envelope for women in art. 
 Like Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois before her, artworld success has been a slow fuse for Kisch and she labored in relative obscurity for decades while her male peers played in the spotlight that is international art. At the turn of the millennium, Kisch acquired a 40 acre parcel of land in the Hamptons which she named 3Ponds. Here she built studios, a sculpture garden and a fabrication facility. Having this fabrication and exhibition space facility now allowed her to produce with increased precision and detail. To the extent of being limited by equipment and production issues, sculpture is much like film requiring great expense and machinery to enter the arena of monumental production and this new facility has put Kisch in control.
 Kisch s background in drawing, painting and printmaking implement her natural instinct as an assembler for the creation of her sculpture. Often, she makes mid-sized drawings which are themselves fascinating icons of shape and form. Ironically, the drawings are not studies for her sculptural work although they are veritably of the same DNA as the three-dimensional work exploring shape and form mainly sans color. Her think tank/studio/meditative retreat affords her a creative workshop in which her art can thrive, as surely as a great filmmaker would, once his myriad pieces of equipment were lined up in one place. Whereas, most artists working in sculpture are at the mercy of a foundry parenthetically including its work schedule, costs and technical drawbacks Kisch now has trained a team that understands her vision and how to execute her work as talented additional hands to her own highly skilled creative work.
 As the new millennium becomes not so new, the artworld has shifted its focus from card trick artists to tactile masters and one sees a growing interest in painters who can paint, sculptors who can sculpt and dexterous masters of drawing. Photorealism downplayed for decades shines in the critical light of a second examination. Longo, Fischl, Gornick, Alexander, Otterness, Bidlo, Currin and several other 80 s artists who present sensational technique are once again in vogue, proving that good work eventually rises to the forefront. In these times, Kisch seems primed for making her statement heard, and the scale, quality and imagery in her work a Big Three in any field betters itself continuously. 
 Herein lies the evidence and, as they say in certain circles, you be the judge.
 - Michael McKenzie

Gloria Kisch: Fusion of Opposites

Gloria Kisch

Arts & Photography

American Image Books

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Books by Gloria Kisch

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gloria Kisch. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gloria Kisch: Fusion of Opposites