FLORENCE WEISZ PORTFOLIOS   ·   ABOUT THE ARTIST   ·   NEWS   ·   CONTACT & LINKS


ABOUT THE ARTIST


Florence Weisz creates artworks which combine organic imagery with geometric forms. The grid matrix she employs is an integral part of her creative process. Weisz has adapted her technique to many media including alcohol-based ink collage paintings, acrylic paintings on canvas, xerography, photography, ceramic tile murals and digital imaging. She specializes in creating new art for specific sites.

She has exhibited her art in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. Her one-person shows have been at the Newark Museum, the Jersey City Museum, the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts, the Pierro Gallery of South Orange at the Baird Center, Kent Place Gallery, Barron Arts Center, Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters, Chubb Corporation Gallery, John Harms Center for the Arts, the Fairlawn Library Gallery, Fairleigh Dickinson University and New Jersey City University galleries.

Weisz's work has been included in group exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Studio Museum of Harlem, Franklin Furnace, BACA Downtown, Pfizer Headquarters in New York, Katonah Museum, Mangel Gallery, Philadelphia, and the Reading Museum, in Pennsylvania; throughout the State of New Jersey including Aljira Gallery, City Without Walls, Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University, Monmouth University Galleries, Tweed, Rabbet, the Printmaking Council, AT&T, Bell Labs, Nabisco, A.J. Lederman galleries, and the Morris, Monmouth, NJ State Museum, Trenton City, Jersey City, Bergen, Newark and Princeton University Museums.

Her paintings are in the collections of The New Jersey State Museum, IBM, The Port of Authority of NY and NJ, Citibank, Warner Lambert, Schering Plough, Gibraltar Securities, City Federal, Depfa Bank, Ciba-Geigy, Marriott Hotels, The University of Pennsylvania Hospital and E.I. du Pont de Nemours.

She has completed site-specific commissions for private homes, corporate and public spaces including, Chubb Insurance, PSE&G, Centocor, Merck Sharp and Dohme, Schering Plough HealthCare Products, Three Stamford Plaza and the Municipality of Beer-Sheva, Israel.

Florence Weisz studied in Paris and Jerusalem after earning a degree in Fine Art from Douglass College, Rutgers University. She is a recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Award.


ABOUT THE ART


The art of Florence Weisz is based on a carefully balanced yet precariously poised tension between chance and control, intuition and intellect, painterly and geometric abstraction.

Her collage paintings begin as she pours, drips and splashes alcohol based inks, solvents and resists onto large suspended sheets of paper. The vibrant, transparent colors flow organically into each other and penetrate the absorbent paper at different rates - a spontaneous and largely uncontrollable process. From these ink infused papers she selects only certain passages to cut or tear, working intuitively, building each composition square by square upon a grid matrix. She sometimes adds acrylic paint, charcoal or pastel and in recent years has integrated digital images from her travels.

An artwork is completed as she adheres the squares onto a museum-board substrate filling the spaces between with narrow strips of paper, sometimes extending them to the edges of the frame. Her work creates a dialogue between the flatness of the paper's surface and the illusion of space: unique abstract landscapes integrating diverse fragments into a harmonious whole.

As described by art writer Erika Leviant:
Weisz's highly intelligent collage paintings are unabashedly modern as opposed to contemporary, taking some of the challenges that faced the Cubists and the Abstract Expressionists and proving in the process the continued validity of abstraction as a painterly choice.




©2012 FLORENCE WEISZ all rights reserved. All images and artwork on this website are copyright protected.