Video clip of artist Jonathan Perlowsky at the Morrison Gallery, 2009
By the mid-‘70s, Perlowsky was producing large abstract works on raw silk, stretched over mirrors that were reminiscent of Josef Albers and Mark Rothko.
Contemporary Artist Jonathan Perlowsky has had a rich career marked by constant experimentation with color, image and surface quality that spans three-decades and evolves through several distinct styles.
Perlowsky began painting in his teens in Connecticut, between undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design and stints working for his father, founder of an estate management services firm with famous clients from the New York worlds of music and the arts. That's where he learned the dedication, inventiveness and craftsman skills that enabled him to use only the few basic materials readily available in, say, a small-town hardware store to achieve a sophisticated urban artistic look.
After moving through a brief period of geometrically shaped canvases using a restricted color palette for a tromp l'oeil three-dimensional effect, Perlowsky shifted to real three-dimensional works in hues of gray, created on canvas stretched over elaborate mahogany forms. "These were gorgeous, but so complex to design and create that the effort was just brutal," recalls Perlowsky. "The blueprints alone took several months to complete."
The artist then shifted to standing glass panels---a medium he would experiment with consistently over the next three decades. He began by lining up three or four panels parallel or at angles to each other and painting them with the thinnest of stripes of different hues: fine stripes "bordering on nothingness," as Perlowsky describes them.