As part of our ongoing Mutual Aid Art Sale, this week Brooklyn Arts Council is honored to present artworks by visual artist Robert Melzmuf and the artists-X-change collective. Both Robert's and the collective's works carry us into the future. In his oceanic portraiture, Melzmuf gazes out onto an infinite, water horizon that is daunting, yet full of infinite promise; through their BoX Project, the artistsXchange collective, accepting the many unknowns of the present moment, has found a profound way to keep artists afloat.
Learn about the artists participating in our Mutual Aid Art Sale below and on social media by following the hashtag #ItsMutual.
About Robert Melzmuf
Image courtesy the artist.
“I support Brooklyn Arts Council because their website alone has connected so many people to me. ”
Robert Melzmuf's work are painterly colorfield abstractions; he wants them to be spacious, airy, and free with simple compositions that are clearly marked by his hand: painterly, of the hand, but depicting a volume of space, which seems counterintuitive. Yet he sees this in the paintings of colorfield, or lyrical abstraction painters, particularly Olitzky, Dzubas, Boxer, Poons, Louis, Rothko, and Diebenkorn; Robert too embraces this feel for abstract compositions of space with a painterly sensibility.
Robert impresses that he could not create such work paintings without the context of the colorfield painters, as they opened the door for his ideas of pictorial space, its depths and volumes, and how gesture shapes that space, in turn enhancing its rhythm and movement around and across the surface of the painting.
Robert's studio is based in Sunset Park Brooklyn.
About artists-X-change
Image courtesy artists-X-change.
artists-X-change, a collective of philanthropic artists, is passionate about keeping Brooklyn artists supported during the unprecedented hardships of 2020 and beyond.
Their first initiative is the BoX Project. BoX provides generous art lovers a way to donate to a vetted partner and receive a unique BoX of art in return. As their first partner, Brooklyn Arts Council is the recipient of all funds raised through the first edition of the BoX Project.
Each BoX contains five original small artworks (with a maximum size of 5″x7″) from artists in the artists-X-change collective, plus an invited artist chosen by Brooklyn Arts Council. Each BoX is hand-created and hand-curated by artists-X-change and is unique in composition. Every BoX is one of a limited edition of twenty.
The BoX Project, not unlike Brooklyn Arts Council's Mutual Aid Art Sale, embodies creative, grassroots philanthropy in its purest form; all facets have been generously donated by working artists, from the artwork to the production.
Artworks for sale featured here include: Robert Melzmuf, Waves, 2019, oil on canvas, 11 x 9"; artists-X-change, BoX Project, 2020, variable dimensions and materials.