page_title: Merle Temkin
section_title: Fingerprint mixed media paintings
hierarchical_section_title: Merle Temkin / Work / Fingerprint mixed media paintings
caption_attribution_description: English: Mixed media painting by artist Merle Temkin, Berries; acrylic paint, dye, thread; 36" x 42", © 2003
context_page_description: Merle Temkin is a New York City-based painter, sculptor and installation artist, most recognized for her vibrant, abstracted paintings based on her own enlarged fingerprint, and her earlier site-specific, mirrored installations of the 1980s. Her work has often involved painstaking, knitting-like processes of assemblage and re-assemblage, visual fragmentation and dislocation, and explorations of identity, the hand and body, and gender. In addition, critics have remarked on the play in her work between rigorous, systematic experimentation and intuitive exploration. Her painted and sewn "Fingerprints" body of work has been noted for its "handmade" quality and "sheer formal beauty" in the Chicago Sun-Times and described elsewhere as a "joining of thread and paint" that is "intensely focused," obsessive and stirring, with "the directness and desperation of marks on cave walls." Critic Dominique Nahas wrote "Temkin's labor-intensive cartography sutures the map of autobiography onto that of the universal in sharply revelatory ways." Her public sculptures have been recognized for their "magical," unexpected perceptual effects and encouragement of viewer participation.
context_section_description: In 1990, Temkin began experimenting with her own dramatically enlarged fingerprints, mixed-media, and non-traditional needlework. Working on large, unprimed canvasses that she stained, painted and stitched, she employed strategies of overlap, repetition, slippage, and disorienting shifts of scale to add rawness, incongruity and ambiguity to the pieces. Her spots, whorls, ridges and scrabbled lines, rendered in heavily layered impasto surfaces, rough embroidery and hot palettes of red, magenta, purple and black, moved toward abstraction, yet also suggested mazes, exotic animal hides, and "energetic patterns, recalling swarm cells, weather movements, cluster formations and other emergent phenomena." Aesthetically, reviewers have most frequently noted the paintings' "evocatively sumptuous" color, pulsating surfaces, and expansive and varied visual language.
  The richness of that language also opened the work to divergent interpretations, despite its seemingly narrow motif. According to Temkin, she explored a symbol that was personal and unique yet "anonymous, universal and genderless," with exposed, hanging threads from stitching subversively suggesting "a secret side or something turned inside-out." Some critics took a feminist approach, saying the work "wittily links the sewer and the sewn," suggesting and carrying on "the legacy of anonymous craft performed by women." ARTnews' Barbara A. McAdam called it "gently self-reflective," "hinting at exposed secrets and women's work." Artist and writer Lois Martin attributed much of the work's impact to Temkin's needlework, suggesting its crude sutures and patterns expressed feminist, as well as, formal and philosophical concerns, while others observed how it touched on modernist and postmodern considerations of the role of the hand and hand-made in art. Temkin's own words lend some support to these interpretations: "Years ago, the 'fine art' I saw in museums was invariably by male artists. Women's work was domestic handiwork (like sewing), and not considered fine art." Discussing the line "that traditionally exists between the craft of needlework and the fine art of paint," she said, "I want to erase that line."
  Critics have also focused on psychological and sociopolitical themes, with the latter gaining resonance in the post-9/11 years. In a review of Temkin's "Fingerprints" exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, Kevin Nance called it "effective and haunting," noting the work's "sliced-and-reconfigured quality suggests a fracturing and reassembling of identity with implications that are both psychological and—especially in this era of increasing surveillance—political." Others remarked on the expressive effects of her processes—scraping, tearing, and sewing—which created the effect of "layers of flayed skin that have been roughly patched and sewn back together," evoking "a sense of both vulnerability and resilience."
caption: Merle Temkin, Berries, acrylic paint, dye, thread, 36" x 42", 2003
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