Framed: 38 x 25 3/4 inches
artist
Mandelman’s life was firmly grounded in art with her first receiving training at age 12 at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. She clearly was influenced by Louis Lozowick’s return from Russia where he visited with her parents and gave news of the Constructivist movement in art there. Much of the aesthetic in the Taos Modern group of which she was a part, has roots in the Constructivist movement.
Mandelman found great freedom in Taos and the ability to enjoy the history and culture of that area and to be able to pursue being an artist. Her husband was artist Louis Ribak and at the end of their lives much of their art and hard work toward the artist community in Taos is evident in the Harwood Museum in Taos and through the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation.
Description
Spring is a delicate, refreshing composition with a sprightly quality evocative of fresh foliage, sunlight, and blossoming form. Bright, irregular shards of green, orange, red, and yellow scatter across a stark white field, their textured, collage-like edges giving the surface a lively, handmade tension. Mandelman often used such white grounds to eliminate spatial depth, placing every form on the same graphic plane so that nothing recedes, leaving the viewer’s eye free to follow the rhythm and movement of the shapes alone. Here, the concentration of color weighted in the upper portion of the canvas, contrasted with generous areas of open space below, creates a sense of drifting elevation and deliberate imbalance. Mandelman rarely sought symmetry; instead, she embraced compositions that teeter toward asymmetry, a psychological cue to her individuality and her quiet but intentional deviation from order.
provenance
The Artist to Estate of the artist
203 Fine Art, Taos, New Mexico
Hindman Auctioneers, Chicago, IL., Post Was and Contemporary Art, 4 May 2021, lot 13