Kanovitz, Howard
KANOVITZ, HOWARD
KANOVITZ, HOWARD (1929– ), U.S. painter. Kanovitz was born at Fall River, Mass., and studied at Providence College, Rhode Island (1947–49), and Rhode Island School of Design (1949–51). He taught at Brooklyn College and Pratt Institute, New York City, until 1964, when he moved to London. Kanovitz achieved international prominence with the development of "Photo-Realism" in the late 1960s and the exhibition under that title of American painters and sculptors, which toured Europe in 1973. Kanovitz's work tends to be more complex than that of the meticulous imitators of reality; he often works in collage or three-dimensional forms. In an interview in the German magazine Kunst (4th quarter, 1971), he explained: "There is nothing in my work that isn't real, yet there is nothing real in my work but paint, canvas, and stretcher. There is much, though, that seems to be real, and this resemblance is the way of cooling off my anxious vision.… The point for me is to find that stage in the painting of images that brings objects to a state of relaxed relationship to other objects, no matter how absurd, and all this should take place logically and with good sense." His first one-man exhibition was at the Stable Gallery, New York, in 1962, since when he held numerous exhibitions in America, including the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1964.
[Charles Samuel Spencer]