STEVE DURKEE | SALE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; The Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts; San Francisco Museum of Art, The Art of Assemblage, October 1961 - April 1962, no. 89

Boston, Sunne Savage Gallery, Thirty Years of Box Construction, November 1979

Durkee is a self-taught artist whose work reflects nostalgia for an everyday American life in the 1940s and 1950s, with poignant compositions of color fields, signs, insignias of popular culture and the antiquated imagery of a lost time. He moved to New York City in 1956, taking a studio on Fulton Street once belonging to Robert Rauchenberg and before that to Cy Twombly. In 1961, he was included in the watershed Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, curated by director William C. Seitz, the same year of his first exhibition with Allan Stone. In 1962, the critic Gene Swenson included Durkee, along with Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Robert Indiana, in an ARTnews article on The New American Sign Painters. Durkee was a member the media art collective, USCO, in Garnerville NY and in 1966 moved to New Mexico with his wife where they founded a spiritual collective called Lama.

Please note that this work will be exhibited at Allan Stone Projects.

Durkee is a self-taught artist whose work reflects nostalgia for an everyday American life in the 1940s and 1950s, with poignant compositions of color fields, signs, insignias of popular culture and the antiquated imagery of a lost time. He moved to New York City in 1956, taking a studio on Fulton Street once belonging to Robert Rauchenberg and before that to Cy Twombly. In 1961, he was included in the watershed Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, curated by director William C. Seitz, the same year of his first exhibition with Allan Stone. In 1962, the critic Gene Swenson included Durkee, along with Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Robert Indiana, in an ARTnews article on The New American Sign Painters. Durkee was a member the media art collective, USCO, in Garnerville NY and in 1966 moved to New Mexico with his wife where they founded a spiritual collective called Lama.