Mel Leipzig Homage to Isaac Witkin 2019, Color Print on Soft Gloss Exhibition Fiber Paper. Hand Signed. Numbered. Dated. Titled.

This print was created by renowned artist Mel Leipzig - one of the best living realist painters. Recently honored by the New Jersey State Museum, Mel Leipzig was a professor of Art and Art History for more than four decades - an influential artist educator beloved by generations of students. Now 84 years old, Leipzig is best known for painting portraits of architects and visual artists like Audrey Flack, Neil Welliver, and many others in their natural habitats - their studios. Most recently he gained national prominence for painting and exhibiting with renowned street and graffiti artists to counter the violence in Trenton. He is represented by Gallery Henoch in Chelsea, NYC. The present print, hand signed and numbered, is based on Leipzig's original painting, a homage to the legendary modernist sculptor and fellow New Jersey artist Isaac Witkin, who died suddenly in 2006.  A protege of Henry Moore, Isaac Witkin is one of the most original and masterful sculptors in the modern era. After creating abstract welded steel works in the 1970's, Witkin began working in bronze, ultimately inventing his own sculptural language, by pouring molten metal onto a flat surface or a sand mold to create abstract shapes, a technique he called "drawing" with bronze, or "action sculpture". By 1985, The New York Times wrote that Isaac Witkin "long ago worked his way out of aesthetic debt to such mentors as Anthony Caro and David Smith and into a powerful lyrical expression of his own." Witkin is known as the "sculptor's sculptor" and the "artist's artist" - revered for his pure artistry by fellow artists (sculptors and painters alike) and by art historians like Mel Leipzig.  Indeed, even though Leipzig is an American realist painter and Witkin a South-African born, London-educated abstract sculptor, Leipzig admired Isaac Witkin, and had always wanted to paint the sculptor in his studio and foundry, located on a blueberry farm in Southern New Jersey. However, Leipzig famously paints only living models, and does not work from photographs. So when Witkin died unexpectedly at the age of 69, Leipzig chose instead to paint the sculptor's daughter, posing in front of her father's opus magnus "Garden State" - done with 73 tons of black Zimbabwe granite - the centerpiece of the resplendent art park Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. 

Below is a link to a documentary on Isaac Witkin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF1mbRD5VLs&t=123s

And a biography of Isaac Witkin:

http://www.artnet.com/awc/isaac-witkin.html 

This work is pencil signed and numbered by the artist, from the limited edition of only 20. Unframed and in excellent condition. A beautiful composition for collectors of prints, paintings and sculpture - and art about art; a realist portrait of abstract art. A terrific conversation piece: a work by a great painter depicting one by a great sculptor. 

Measurements: 

24 x 30 inches (sheet)

20 7/8 x 26 1/2 inches (image). 

SIGNATURE

Hand signed, numbered, titled and dated on lower recto (front). 

PROVENANCE

 Acquired directly from the artist and publisher