MICHAEL MAZUR
You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom.
The water flows.
– Li Po (701-762)
Down Mountain, 2003. Color lithograph on Somerset velvet. Paper Size: 29.5 x 27 in. Edition of 40
Untitled, 1996. Color lithograph on Somerset velvet. Paper Size: 28.75 x 26 in. NFS
Thaw I, 1998. Color lithograph on Somerset velvet. Paper Size: 28.75 x 26 in. NFS
We enter the world of Michael Mazur's work quietly. The moment expands, and we are presented with a field of color and shape that takes us out of ourselves. In the place, we are invited to participate in the unveiling of the image. We see in his prints, the artist’s world of shape and void, movement and rest, nearness and distance, all come to life. A landscape of the mind.
In his Dream, Imagination, and Existence, Michel Foucault writes that “space presents itself first and foremost as scene or landscape. It gives itself originally as the distance of colored plenitudes or of the reaches lost in the horizon.” He is talking here about the space of dreams, but what is a work of art but the expression of the space of the imagination? In Mazur’s prints, horizons are established and blurred, enfolded, curved inward. Under the eye’s inward gaze, the scene of the mind is mutable. Foucault calls this the “space of things there, resistant to my touch; is it to my right or to my left, opaque or transparent to my gaze?” Questions we ask ourselves when we move through the overlapping forms of Mazur’s prints.
Autumnal, 2000. Color lithograph on Somerset velvet. Paper Size: 28.75 x 26 in. NFS
Mazur described a series of related paintings as “mental gardens.” With titles such as Lake, Forest, or When and Where, the artist established a language of abstract symbolism associated with art of the East. While traveling in China, the artist absorbed the world of the masters of that tradition, incorporating into his own work a fluidity and sense of open design which is at once intimate and expansive. His rhythmic field of calligraphic marks plays off against shifting transparencies of color to achieve an intense luminosity.
This space of light is punctuated by decidedly dark, personal motif, creating a lyrical play of light and shadow. Foucault suggests that “lyric expression is possible only in the alternation of light and darkness, where existence plays itself out.” Here we see the lyric as the dramatic lightscape of the imagination. As Mazur plays or acts out his personal drama in the image, we are witness. But what is it that we are witnessing? The shape that is repeated longs to be named, but is forever escaping, changing color, transcending the nameable. Tree, cloud, or flower, or… finally we do not need a referent. We are freed of the burden of representation and are left to enjoy the harmony of his vivid dance of forms.
– Andrew Mockler
B. 1935, NEW YORK, NY D. 2009 CAMBRIDGE, MA
Michael Mazur was relentlessly experimental and curious in his work. He showed regularly at the Mary Ryan Gallery in New York and at the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston. A traveling show: Michael Mazur: A Print Retrospective, was organized by the Jane Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in 2000, and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His group shows include Printmaking in America, Collaborative Prints and presses 1960-1990, traveled 1996; The Unique Print, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1990); The Brooklyn Museum Print Biennial (1986); The Painterly Print, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1980); and Print Biennial, National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C. (1977). His work is included in many public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (all in New York), and the Museum of Fine Arts, boston. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award.