Gerome Kamrowski

Gerome Kamrowski (1914-2004) was born in Warren, Minnesota, and raised in St. Cloud. He entered the Saint Paul School of Art in 1932, studied briefly at the Art Students League in 1933, and worked on Minnesota WPA mural projects. In 1937 he entered the New Bauhaus in Chicago, studying in the orbit of László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Archipenko. The following year, despite Hilla Rebay’s hostility toward Surrealism, a fellowship she arranged through the Museum of Non-Objective Painting enabled Kamrowski to study with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. He then moved to New York, where he joined artists testing Surrealist automatism as a route toward abstraction.

In New York, Kamrowski emerged as a First Generation New York School artist, closely connected with William Baziotes, Roberto Matta, Peter Busa, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and others working at the intersection of Surrealism and abstraction. During the winter of 1940-41, Kamrowski, Baziotes, and Pollock collaborated on an experimental painting using poured and dripped paint. These experiments helped establish the technical and conceptual ground from which Abstract Expressionism developed. Kamrowski's drawings appeared in VVV, and he exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century in 1943 and in the 1947 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

Betty Parsons organized Kamrowski's first solo exhibition at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery in 1946. His 1950 Paris exhibition at Galerie R. Creuze was introduced by André Breton, who praised "the quality and sustained character of his research." Kamrowski's emphasis on research-driven experimentation was the principle that sustained his career.

He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1946 and taught there until 1982. Geographically settled in Ann Arbor but artistically unaffiliated, he found a productive kind of conceptual homelessness. He said that he was "not trapped into one style," and continued to extend the freedom of automatism across painting, works on paper, shaped supports, construction, architecture, geodesic paintings and domes, space grids, and sculpture. He organized the Hylozoist Group in 1958, bringing together artists interested in form as active, mutable, and responsive rather than fixed.

The University of Michigan Museum of Art organized a retrospective in 1983 and The Worlds of Gerome Kamrowski: Surrealism and Beyond in 2003. Across those decades, the later work remained continuous with the early work's investment in chance, transformation, material behavior, and the instability of form. His mosaics and animal forms are among the final manifestations of a much broader practice in which no single medium or signature style was allowed to become an endpoint. Kamrowski died in Ann Arbor in 2004.

Solo Exhibitions (Partial List):