page_title: Merle Temkin
section_title: Background & Life
hierarchical_section_title: Merle Temkin / Background & Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail of Backfire, a site-specific installation by artist Merle Temkin, at the CUNY Mall, NYC in 1984. Materials: plexi-mirror strips, fluorescent paint, galvanized steel; dimensions: 6' x 32" x 5'.
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: Born in Chicago in 1937, Temkin would attend the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1950s before returning to earn a BFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959. While there, she painted in an Abstract-Expressionist style, but longed to develop an authentic voice of her own. Soon after graduating, she moved with her husband to San Francisco, where they would have three children, Lara, David and Alex. Temkin continued to work in the 1960s, largely in collage, while taking courses at the San Francisco Art Institute, eventually earning an MFA in sculpture in 1974.
  In 1978, a move to New York City opened new opportunities, including Temkin's distinctive mirrored installations of the 1980s and work co-editing the "Feminism and Ecology" issue (#13, 1981) of Heresies, the feminist magazine. In 1987, her first permanent, site-specific commission—Sundial (1987), a work in which she etched the image of her hand into rocks—was accidentally destroyed in Israel just after completion, and a devastated Temkin shifted to interior, more personal works. By 1990, she embarked on the fingerprint paintings that would dominate her efforts for the next two decades. Temkin often finds inspiration in travel; seeing zebras in Africa suggested a new, striated approach to her fingerprint works, while an observation in London in 2010 spurred an ongoing change in subject matter to trees. Temkin has exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Israel, Germany and South Korea, with solo exhibitions at PS1, Art Resources Transfer and Artists Space in New York, and the Chicago Cultural Center, and a sculpture commission at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. She lives and works in New York City.
caption: Merle Temkin, Detail of Backfire, CUNY Mall, NYC; plexi-mirror strips, fluorescent paint, galvanized steel; 6' x 32" x 5', 1984
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