Robert Birmelin was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933. After finishing his studies at Cooper Union, Yale and The Slade School of Art at the University of London, he settled in New York in 1960. His career since that date has been remarkable. He has worked with a quiet steadiness, growing and evolving, both as a painter and in public recognition.
Birmelin’s talent seems to have been recognized almost from the beginning. Over the years he has had fifty one-man shows including thirteen at institutional museums and galleries. In New York he showed with the Stable Gallery in the sixties, the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in the seventies, and since then the Odyssia Gallery, Claude Bernard (both in New York and Paris) and most recently, the Radix Gallery. In addition there have been shows in Buenos Aires, California, Connecticut, Florida, Chicago, Maryland, New Mexico and Washington, D.C..
Birmelin’s work is included in 37 Public Collections, including; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshorn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.
My preoccupations revolve around our common shared experience, or perhaps I might term it the submerged component of that experience. My work is about a state of mind, about the internal contradictions we live with. It is about how we often find ourselves simultaneously balancing two mutually exclusive, contradictory ideas or interpretations. It is not unusual to find that a relative or friend's memory of a past event clashes with one's own. Indeed, how often do two witnesses to the same crime contradict one another as to what really occurred? As an artist, I found myself seeking a visual structure that would be an active metaphor for such a state of mind - a structure continuous and spatially rich that initially seems to offer an uncomplicated, expected orientation and then self subverts, challenging the observer to recognize the claims of another equally visually insistent counter-reading. Our minds are restless, making choices, fluctuating between possibilities as we strive to interpret, to judge between contending truths. These paintings live in mid-thought, in the space of that uncertainty - an all too familiar space in a world of bewildering choice.
ROBERT BIRMELIN, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER, 2000
He has received seventeen scholarships and grants including a Fulbright Scholarship in 1960 and National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1976, 1982 and 1990. Among his many awards is the Carnegie Prize in 1987.
He has been a visiting artist at ten universities and colleges - he has lectured at eighteen. Since 1964 he has taught at Queens College of CUNY, New York, as a full professor since 1974.
Robert Birmelin has a unique vision and position among the figurative painters of our time. We are proud to represent him at the Peter Findlay Gallery.
