Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to announce Engrossed in the shell (the sky and the circle), an exhibition of historical works by American artist Loretta Dunkelman, on view from October 22 through December 21, 2024. The monumental works on paper, drawings, and paintings which comprise this exhibition were made between 1972 and 1987 and reveal the breadth of the artist’s creative output during this time. A founding member of the pioneering feminist A.I.R. Gallery, Dunkelman has lived and worked in lower Manhattan since 1961. This marks her first solo exhibition in nearly four decades.

In 1971, Dunkelman began a series of monumental works on paper which represent some of the earliest examples in the contemporary movement of major art works made with drawing techniques and materials. Inspired by studies of the sky at different times of the day made during her travels to the Aegean Islands, her five-paneled work on paper, Ice-Sky, was included in the seminal 13 Women Artists exhibition at 117 Prince Street in 1972 and the 1973 Whitney Biennial. Dunkelman returned to painting in oil on canvas after 1979, continuing to mine natural motifs, including landscapes and the windows of sky enveloping them. Her interest in color and light are evident in the suite of large-format oil paintings made between 1986-88 while living in Richmond, Virginia. The luminous, layered surfaces of these works evoke her earlier explorations in pencil on paper.

Dunkelman (b. 1937, Paterson, NJ) earned an MA from Hunter College in 1966, where she studied under Tony Smith and Ad Reinhardt, and a BA in art from Douglass College (Rutgers University) in 1958. She presented six solo exhibitions with A.I.R. Gallery (New York, NY) between 1973–1987. Notably, her large scale works on paper were included in Women Choose Women at the New York Cultural Center (New York, NY); Of Paper at the Newark Museum (Newark, NJ); American Drawings 1963-73 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); New Painting: Stressing Surface at The Katonah Gallery (Katonah, NY) alongside works by Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, and Ralph Humphrey; and New York Now at the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ). She has participated in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (Queens, NY); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY); Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ); and 55 Walker (New York, NY), among others.

Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Hunter College, New York, NY; City University Graduate Center, New York, NY; Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY; and Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ. She is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has taught at Cornell University, Virginia Commonwealth University, UC Berkeley and the Art Institute of Chicago.