15 Facts About Merle Temkin

Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, known for vibrant, abstracted paintings based on her own enlarged fingerprint, and earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s.

Merle Temkin's work has often involved knitting-like processes of assemblage and re-assemblage, visual fragmentation and dislocation, and explorations of identity, the hand and body, and gender.

Merle Temkin's work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, New York Magazine, and the Washington Post.

Merle Temkin's work belongs to the permanent collections of the Racine Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and Israel Museum, among others.

Merle Temkin continued to work in the 1960s, largely in collage, while taking courses at the San Francisco Art Institute, eventually earning an MFA in sculpture in 1974.

In 1978, a move to New York City opened new opportunities, including Merle Temkin's distinctive mirrored installations of the 1980s and work co-editing the "Feminism and Ecology" issue of Heresies, the feminist magazine.

Merle Temkin often finds inspiration in travel; seeing zebras in Africa suggested a new, striated approach to her fingerprint works, while an observation in London in 2010 spurred a shift in subject matter to trees.

Merle Temkin has exhibited throughout the US and in Israel, Germany and South Korea, with solo exhibitions at PS1, Art Resources Transfer and Artists Space in New York, and the Chicago Cultural Center, and a sculpture commission at the National Building Museum in Washington DC She lives and works in New York City.

Works in this vein include City Gates and Mirror Piece for Phyllis, a guerilla work Merle Temkin installed on park backstops as part of a 1981 Washington Project for the Arts "Streetworks" show in DC, which authorities forced her to remove.

In 1990, Merle Temkin began experimenting with her own greatly enlarged fingerprints, mixed-media, and non-traditional needlework.

Merle Temkin painted spots, whorls, ridges and scrabbled lines rendered in heavily layered impasto surfaces, rough embroidery and hot palettes of red, magenta, purple and black.

In 2010, Merle Temkin shifted subject matter from fingerprints to trees, still retaining her labor-intensive working process.

Merle Temkin's work is held in the permanent collections of several institutions and organizations.

Merle Temkin's work is in the permanent collections of the Israel Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Jersey City Museum, and Boston Fidelity Investments, among others.

Merle Temkin is a two-time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, in 2010 and 2001.