Beyond Black Mountain: Irwin Kremen (1966 to 2006)

The renowned artist Irwin Kremen s collages, paintings, and sculptures are composed from such diverse materials as scraps of weathered paper, wasp nests, saw blades, and steel. Irwin Kremen: Beyond Black Mountain (1966 to 2006) is the exhibition catalog accompanying a retrospective covering forty years of the artist s career. The work will be on display at Duke University s Nasher Museum of Art from March 22, 2007 through June 17, 2007. A longtime North Carolina resident and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duke University, Kremen studied literature and writing with M. C. Richards at the legendary Black Mountain College in the mid-1940s. There he met John Cage, David Tutor, and Merce Cunningham, all of whom became close friends, artistic inspirations, and ardent supporters.

Kremen did not show his work publicly until a 1978 exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art featuring mostly small non-representational collages. In 1979 his works were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution s National Collection of Fine Arts, where they were received enthusiastically; the Washington Star heralded him as an American master of collage on the level of Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, and Romare Bearden. Since then, Kremen s work has been shown in nearly thirty shows in the United States and abroad; favorably reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Artforum International, the Chicago Tribune, and Art News; and acquired by museums and private collectors across the country.

The catalog includes full color illustrations of more than 100 of Kremen s collages as well as twelve sculptures and three monumental pieces made over the past decade in collaboration with the Duke art professor William Noland.