John Torreano named 2011 Malloy Visiting Artist
Carina, 2007, 108 x 162 inches, acrylic paint,
Krylon paint, acrylic gems, wood balls on
plywood panels mounted on 2 x 2 inch
aluminum angle frame supports.
John Torreano of New York will deliver this spring's Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture
at Skidmore College at 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 22, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain
Hall. Admission to the illustrated talk is free and open to the public.
A professor of studio art at New York University, where he has taught since 1992,
Torreano has for the past 20 years specialized in working primarily on wood panels.
His subjects continue to come from newer discoveries of and about outer space. "And
I continue to be fascinated with perception and how it informs our relationship to
art," he said.
His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries of national and international standing, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Indianapolis Museum of Fine Arts, and numerous others, including Skidmore's own Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.
Torreano's has twice been included in group shows at the Tang, most recently in The Jewel Thief (2010-11), which showcased abstract art at theintersection with the decorative and functional elements of architecture.In 2004-05 Torreano's art was included in A Very Liquid Heaven, which explored the human perception of stars, with an emphasis on the contrast between the traditional picture of immutable points of light and the modern picture of physical objects.
He is the recipient of a Nancy Graves Foundation Grant for Visual Artists, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and individual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council of the Arts. He is represented in New York by Feature Inc. Gallery
In May 2007 his latest book, titled Drawing by Seeing, was released. He calls it "my contribution to teaching, a perceptual based series of exercises for the beginner or the advanced artist."
The Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture Series annually brings to Skidmore distinguished contemporary artists of international stature. The series was endowed in 1991 by artist Susan Rabinowitz Malloy, a 1945 Skidmore graduate. Her work has appeared in numerous group and solo shows in New York and Connecticut.