| Michael Mazur | ||
| Birth Date: November 2, 1935 |
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| Death Date: August 18, 2009 Artist Gallery |
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| Born in New York City in 1935, Michael Mazur received a BA from Amherst College, Massachusetts, in 1958, studying in his senior year at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence Italy. He went on to earn both a B FA (1959) and an MFA (1961) from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, New Haven Connecticut.
Mazur was a printmaker, painter, and was continuously inventive throughout his career, producing work that spanned across the widest range of styles and mediums, from realism to abstraction, stating that “the creative act is an act of imagination which applies to any choice of subject matter”. He is perhaps most revered for his profound insight into, and depictions of, internal and external human suffering and vulnerability.
In the two series of etchings and lithographs that brought him to prominence in the early '60s, “Closed Ward” and “Locked Ward”, Mazur created abstracted images depicting inmates in a mental asylum in unbearable torment. In 1994, Mazur produced what he called "parallel translations" of Dante's Inferno in collaboration with the poet Robert Pinsky. In one illustration, “Ugolino”, Mazur captures both horror and sadness in the eyes of Count Ugolino as he tells his story, frozen in the center of hell and gnawing on the head of his arch-enemy.
Mazur studied with Leonard Baskin, Gabor Peterdi and Bernard Chaet in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, he experimented using an airbrush to apply blacks, greys and whites in multi-panel depictions of studio spaces and objects, concentrating on a personal vision of pictorial space. He has worked with monotypes for many years.
Mazur passed away from congestive heart failure at the age of 73.
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