Red Grooms is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, and showman par excellence. His major installations, “Ruckus Manhattan”, “The City of Chicago”, and “Tut’s Fever” have stretched the boundaries of sculpture and painting and excited the imaginations of thousands of viewers.
Red Grooms and Master printer Bud Shark began their many print collaborations in 1981 with “Mountaintime”, followed in 1982 by their first three-dimensional lithograph, “Ruckus Taxi”. The range of prints produced by Grooms and Shark include `flatsos’, flat-color lithographs, like “Elvis” and “Van Gogh with Sunflowers”, three-dimensional lithographs, “London Bus”, “Little Italy” and “Times Square”, three-dimensional lithographs with moving parts, “Red’s Roxy”, and “Holy Hula”, woodcuts, “Noa Noa” and numerous monotypes.
In Red Grooms’ newest three-dimensional print, The Carriage Trade, the artist once again casts his acute eye on life in New York City. He captures an autumn street scene with a row of colorful carriage houses on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The scene is busy with neighborhood activity that includes school children, a jogger with a leashed dog, a man blowing leaves, a delivery person with a cart full of packages, a cyclist and others.
Grooms also completed a series of colorful monotype collages, a tribute to Henri Matisse. The Matisse Cut Outs portray the artist working in his studio on his well known cut out paper collages. The monotypes have actual cut out pieces of paper and paper tacks collaged to the prints to make them dimensional.
Red Grooms’ work is exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and Japan. He is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, The Denver Art Museum, The Fort Worth Art Museum, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas, Venezuela, and numerous others.
A catalogue raisonné of Grooms prints “Red Grooms: The Graphic Work” has been published by Harry Abrams. A retrospective exhibition of his prints traveled to museums across the US between 2001 and 2006.
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