JONATHAN PERLOWSKY | read Reviews

Contemporary artist Jonathan Perlowsky has had a rich career marked by constant experimentation with color, image and surface quality that spans three-decades and evolves through several distinct styles. Perlowsky began painting in his teens in Litchfield County CT, between undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design and stints working for his father, founder of an estate management services firm with famous clients from the New York worlds of music and the arts. “That’s where I learned the dedication, inventiveness and craftsman skills that enabled me to use only the few basic materials readily available in, say, a small-town hardware store to achieve a sophisticated urban artistic look,” Perlowsky recalls.

By the mid-‘70s, the artist was producing large abstract works on raw silk, stretched over mirrors that were reminiscent of Josef Albers and Mark Rothko. After moving through a brief period of geometrically shaped canvases using a restricted color palette for a tromp l’oeil three-dimensional effect, Perlowsky shifted to real three-dimensional works in hues of gray, created on canvas stretched over elaborate mahogany forms. “These were gorgeous, but so complex to design and create that the effort was just brutal,” recalls Perlowsky. “The blueprints alone took several months to complete.” The artist then shifted to standing glass panels---a medium he would experiment with consistently over the next three decades. He began by lining up three or four panels parallel or at angles to each other and painting them with the thinnest of stripes of different hues: fine stripes “bordering on nothingness”, as Perlowsky describes them.

After a first show at the Washington (CT) Art Association, Perlowsky rapidly began receiving the kind of recognition that culminated in a first solo exhibit in 1981 at the age of 28. Held at the Soho-based Westbroadway Gallery in Manhattan, it was the first of five solo shows he would receive there. Shows at the Horizon and Erotics galleries would soon follow. The Westboadway Gallery was one of the first breakaway galleries to usher in the vibrant Soho art scene in Manhattan. It was during this era that Perlowsky, living and painting in New York introduced the use of mirrors, glitter and Day-Glo pigment to minimalism, foreshadowing a genre that continues today in the work of such well-known artists as Anselm Reyle and Imi Knoebel.

Two years ago, inspired by a local store’s paint sample booklets, revisited his early abstract work employing stripes of color and began experimenting with monumental wooden panels of parallel stripes of controlled, yet vibrant colors done with multiple coats of enamel paints. Each was laboriously hand-sanded and buffed to achieve a smooth, glass-like sheen. In his signature quest for extraordinary surface quality with ordinary materials, Perlowsky then stretched taut plastic film over some of the latest panels, creating surfaces that evoke, as he describes it, “a breeze-tossed ocean”.