Profile – Fulton Street Collective

Tamara Wasserman

Biographical Info Tamara Wasserman is a contemporary visual artist with main concentration in painting. She works in oils, acrylics, collage, mixed media, and installation art. Wasserman was born in Riga, Latvia, and moved to Israel with her family as a teenager. Wasserman developed as a self-taught artist during her military service and then entered the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, Israel. There she studied under the influential Israeli artists of the 1980’s; Pinchas Cohen-Gan, Deddie Ben-Shaul, Zvi Tolkowsky and Nachum Tevet. After graduating Tamara realized that Israeli art scene of the late 1980’s was somewhat chauvinistic and rigid, still dominated by the same handful of abstract-minimalist artists that she studied under. In search of a more open art milieu Tamara moved to the US and settled in Chicago in 1990. Soon after arriving Wasserman joined a fringe experimental theatre DOORIKA and started to exhibit with Sonia Zaks (1992) and Judy Saslow galleries (1996). Numerous National exhibitions and performances followed. Through the years Tamara’s artistic vision found its’ expression in painting, installation art, theatre, songwriting, and performance art. Wasserman exhibited and performed in Chicago, New York City, Anne Arbor MI, South Bend IN, Boston and Los Angeles, to name a few. Tamara’s latest Solo exhibition was held in June 2022 at Oliva Gallery in Chicago, which was her 2nd solo at this gallery. Wasserman’s paintings are a part of many private collections in the US, England, Switzerland, Israel, and Russian Federation. Her studio is at Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago.

Artist Type painter

Location Chicago

Short Description I am a painter. My work is driven by daily events and by the creative process and physicality of the touch and the gesture. I experiment and push my own boundaries in search of the unexpected. I encourage reality to interact with physicality. I am convinced that both the universe and our inner world are an exquisite and ever-changing play of the figurative and the abstract. My art reflects that believe. My work is very intuitive, and I trust ideas to find their way into the piece. My process is additive and reductive. I add and delete and cover with layers of paint the elements added earlier, usually recreating them again later in the process. Working in this physical way allows my mind to stay open and present in the process. It also adds texture and thickness, keeping the painting tactile, fresh, and vulnerable. In my work I use paint, collage, and fragments of natural elements. I work on canvas, paper, and wood, using brushes, fingers, scrapers, or rags to apply and remove paint. Some of my work is stitched. I find it exciting to explore one powerful composition or structure in a few different sizes and proportions. This way, since the composition is settled in advance, I feel free to explore different variations and expressions of that idea while it keeps cooking in my brain. I like working with extreme shifts in sizes. Often times my ideas develop into wall collages. My work is influenced by music, poetry, or history, a newly discovered place, a melody, the rhythm of a train car, the sounds, the views that pass by that train’s window…

Website

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/wassermantamara

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