This is Howard Kanovitz

Howard Kanovitz (February 9, 1929 – February 2, 2009) was a pioneering painter in the Photorealist and Hyperrealist Movements, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in reaction to the abstract art movement.

Howard Kanovitz, whose 50-year career ranged from abstract expressionism to computer imaging, was to the front of the art bustle known as photorealism. His 1966 landmark Jewish Museum solo exhibition launched this further genre of photo-based painting. Though dubbed by Barbara Rose “the grandfather of photorealism”, Kanovitz’s decree transcended that classification in “realistic paintings for which the concept of authenticity is too narrow.” The preeminent art historian Sam Hunter described how Kanovitz’s “meticulous airbrush technique and accurateness of vision fabricate an make public of doubt rather than certitude and posed questions of meaning which challenge the enormously nature of the artistic experience.”

After touching to New York City in the 1950s Kanovitz worked as the accomplice to Franz Kline. He speedily became allocation of the downtown abstract expressionist scene, exhibiting works at the fabled Tenth Street galleries, the Tanager and Hansa, and in the Stable Gallery annuals, where he had his first one-man measure in 1962.

Even during the years like Kanovitz was receiving laudatory reviews for his abstract work, Kanovitz always painted privately next an inclusion in the figure and further ways to evaluate the magic of form in space upon a flat canvas. In 1963 after the death of his father, while poring higher than family photographs, Kanovitz had a Roland Barthes-like, punctum moment, that solidified his fascination in the birds of representation and the highbrow relationship amongst subjectivity, meaning, and memory. He began using photographs as source material, either appropriated from the media or taken himself. In 1972, the Americans Chuck Close, Richard Estees, and Howard Kanovitz were chosen to member Europeans Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Malcolm Morley, and Franz Gertsch, in Harald Szeemann’s groundbreaking international art exposition documenta V, held in Kassel Germany, as the pre-eminent exponents of this extra photo based painting. He after that represented America in documenta VI, 1977.

In 1979 Kanovitz was awarded the prestigious DAAD fellowship to stimulate and take action in Berlin, where he had a mid-career retrospective of more than 200 works at the Akademie der Künste, which then traveled to the Kestner Society, Hannover. He taught at the Salzburger Summer Art School, founded by Oscar Kokoschka, as competently as at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and took upon stage design projects in both America and Germany. In accessory to the three one person museum exhibitions already cited, and one at Museum of Contemporary Art in Utrecht, Kanovitz had exceeding fifty one person gallery exhibitions including the Waddell, Stefanotty, Alex Rosenberg, and Marlborough galleries in New York, the Gana Art Gallery in Seoul Korea, and the Jollenbeck, Inge Baecker and Ulrig Gering Gallery in Germany where he had his last one person action in 2008, one year before he died. He participated in more than 100 intervention shows in America and Europe.