Shalom Neuman (artist)
Shalom Neuman (b. July 27, 1947) is a Czech born Israeli American painter, sculptor, interdisciplinary "multisensory" multi-media artist, and arts and cultural center impresario working within the format of what he has termed "Fusionism".
Early life
Shalom Tomas Neuman was born in 1947 in what was then Czechoslovakia into a Jewish family with whom he emigrated to Haifa, Israel when he was ten years old. Many members of his extended family died at Auschwitz. The family next emigrated for a second time in this instance to the United States where he has resided ever since.
Education and career
Neumann studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia before going on to get dual BFAs and MFAs from Carnegie Mellon University in Sculpture and painting. He then went on to complete a post-graduate fellowship in painting and sculpture at the University of Indiana. He also won a Damrosch Scholarship to study at the Fountainbleau School of Fine Arts in France where he was given the Fountainbleau Beaux Arts Painting Prize.
Neuman has taught at the Cooper Union, Parsons School of Design and PRATT Institute among other colleges and universities.
After Neuman moved to New York City's Lower East Side and onto the moving sidewalk of the East Village art scene he became a part of the art group known as the Rivington School whose members became known for their welding, forging, performance and or street painting. He then went on to work within his own vocabulary which set the stage for what he continues to pursue the art concept of "Fusionism". Neuman defines "Fusionism as he stated in an interview with Lisa Chau in the Huffington Post as ..."inspired by the Futurists and Russian Constructivists’ attempts to capture reality by tapping into current technological innovations and representing our reality by developing the methodologies and techniques to create a seamless and invisible transition between different art disciplines. I wanted to create a multi-sensory art that evolved and changed through time".
In 1983, Neuman purchased a tenement building on Stanton Street on the Lower East Side and turned it into the first edition of the FusionArts Museum replete with his oversize "Fusionistic" creations including what author Joseph Berger refers to as "Fusion Golems" and describes as "large animated robots with arms made of plastic ducts and hair salvaged from brooms". In 2012 the initial New York City space closed as a museum but was in turn transubstantiated by spaces in Easton, Pennsylvania and his hometown of Prague, Czech Republic.
From August 19 until September 18, 2011 Neuman's work was the subject of the exhibition “The Art of Fusion Art: Talking at You,” at the Czech National Gallery. In September 2013 Neuman was awarded a Premio Galileo 2000 by the Fondazione Premio Galileo 2000 and created a celebratory performance executed at Florence's Teatro Della Pergola titled "Fusionissimo: A Temporary Autonomous Zone".
He had an extended artistic and philosophical association with the Italian artist and art writer Enrico Baj . Neuman has engaged in a long term collaboration with and is a member of the rag-tag multi-participatory literary collective "The Unbearables".
Critical reception
Writer Robert C. Morgan speaking of Neuman's series "AMERIKANS" interviewed in The Villager said of the works that they are "less portraits than archetypes” (and are) “composites of much of the weirdness that the artist encounters in the human beings themselves"... and in writing of Neuman's opus as a whole calls it "“humanism in exile”. In speaking on the same series Lester Strong describes the works in Dissent Magazine as "more than a little disturbing. Constructed from the detritus of our society, they reach beyond the individual to comment on a culture where rampant consumerism threatens to engulf us all, a form of identity theft writ large that threatens our very humanity"......
Art critic Donald Kuspit in his essay "Reconciling The Irreconcilable" in the artist's coffee table retrospective book "Shalom Neuamn - 40 Years of Fusion Art, 1967 - 2007" relates that ... "Neuman is an unprecedented phenomenon, the creator of “Fusion Art,” a “multidisciplinary” enterprise having its roots in “assemblage, constructivism, expressionism, surrealism and new technology" .... and goes on later in the piece to relate of his work (that) "What looks chaotic is subliminally cohesive; what seems like a random display of signs and symbols, drawn from all quarters of culture, emotionally harmonizes"....
Of Neuman's work Enrico Baj wrote..."The absurd, irony, the paradox and satire which are continuously materialized in Shalom’s work constitute the best strategies that we can prepare in order to safeguard our temporary autonomous zone and our psychic equilibriums, overwhelmed and swept away in the chaos of contradictory complexity."....
Peter Frank former art critic for LA Weekly and the Village Voice offered in writing on the artist's work in 2014 in relation to the virtual age now upon us that. it is "an anachronism whose time has come"....
Lee Klein in writing for the online journal "A Gathering of the Tribes" contextually compared Neuman's work to that of the British sculptress Phyllida Barlow in observing that... "Here in the historic boat parking lot whole sections were given over to rising art world phenoms like the Vietnamese born Danish performance art influenced instillation artist, Danh Vo and Phyllida Barlow’s hanging detritus. Specifically the British art professor who left academe to pursue her own work piece’s blended right in with the scarred walls of the Arsenale. The segue had this oft voyaging re-canter thinking of our very own Shalom Neuman.. He who has very often offered the word “Fusion” for interdisciplinary work which attempts to well seamlessly well fuse (though more aptly converge and the Italian creation Fusionisimo works wonders) but these were at a broader confluence it is very much easier at close range in a Veruschka type of way Rothko , seamless"...
Neuman's work has also been covered extensively in the journal Sensitive Skin by among others Lyn Lifshin.