Michael Gitlin (born 1943 in Cape Town, South Africa) is a contemporary sculptor.
Life and work
Michael Gitlin's family emigrated from South Africa to Israel in 1948. Gitlin received his BA in English Literature and Art History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1967). He simultaneously studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduating in 1967. Gitlin moved to New York City in 1970 and received an MFA from Pratt Institute (1972). His first museum show was at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1977. That same year, his work was exhibited at the Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Gitlin was represented by the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf and works of his were acquired by such institutions as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gugghenheim Museum in New York. In the 1980s, Gitlin taught sculpture at the Parsons School of Design and Columbia University in New York, the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, and the University of California in Davis.
Gitlin's work can be characterized as abstract and reductive. He began his career working three-dimensionally, first with paper and later with wood, using paper as a medium rather than a support. His sculptures are mostly wall pieces, which depend on architecture for their physical and contextual support. In a 1996 catalogue for a show at Katrin Rabus Gallery in Bremen, Germany, Barry Schwabsky describes Gitlin's work as "characterized above all by its restlessness [...]. The object in crisis – for Gitlin at least, and perhaps only for him, such is the risk of the artist – implicates the subject of sculpture more than its means. For the sculptor, there is the object and there is the space it inhabits, and these must have a determinate relationship. This relationship is perhaps the true subject of the work." [1]
In recent years, Gitlin has worked with steel wool, copper wire, foam, and black spandex. Drawing too has always been a demanding part of Gitlin's project.
New York Public Library, New York Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany
Städtische Galerie, Erlangen, Germany Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
Wilhelm-Hack- Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany
Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum, Duisburg, Germany
[5] AbsoluteArts on Michael Gitlin's 2003 exhibition at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia: "Unconventional Three-Dimensional: Michael Gitlin and Michael Zansky"