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Ann Rosen & Diane Thodos

Ann Rosen
Ann Rosen is a painter and more recently a sculptor. She received a BA from the University of Illinois and attended the Graduate School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also studied for 3 years in the studio of Ed Paschke. Previously she has taught art to adults in various venues and to children in the Chicago and suburban public schools. She has exhibited in Chicago and New York. Recently she has exhibited in Babel, Thomas Masters Gallery Chicago, Sculpture Invasion, Koehnline Museum, Des Plaines, IL., Feminism Now, ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL, Contemporary Portraits, Water Street Studios, Bactavia, IL., and Feminism Across Generations, Koehline Museum, Des Plaines, IL. and Brauer Museum, Valparaiso, IN.

As the Executive Director of The Art Center of Highland Park for 18 years, she curated and juried numerous exhibitions. She initiated and directed for 14 years the Highland Park Festival of Fine Crafts which ]showcased 130 national artists.

She has received numerous awards in recognition of her efforts to promote the arts in the community. She received honors from the Mayor of Highland Park, the Illinois State Congress and the YWCA of Lake County receiving their Woman of the Year Achievement Award in the Arts.

Diane Thodos
The current prints and paintings of Diane Thodos promise to be an intense emotional experience that reflects the turbulence of our times. Without directly naming the origin of contemporary traumas such as, 9-11, terrorism, or the war in Iraq, she attempts to essentialize emotional states in graphic form in order to grasp their universal and often tragic significance.

Her work often balances emotional intensity with energetic immediacy as an inspired tribute to Modernism, merging figure and abstraction in her own unique and intuitive compositional dynamic.

As a Pollock Krasner Grant recipient in 2002 her art embodies the Expressionist essence of feeling in art strongly influenced by the historical movements of both American Abstract and German Expressionism.  As a student of Jackson Pollack’s Abstract Expressionist teacher Stanley William Hayter Diane Thodos developed the use of automatist line and gesture that combined with her enduring interest in the powerful graphic techniques of German Expressionist printmaking (1906 – 1924) which she studied extensively in the Specks collection from the Chicago area and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Diane Thodos had a one person exhibition at the Hellenic Museum in Chicago in 2009 and will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2010.

Her work is represented on an international basis by the Paule Friedland and Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.  She has also studied with the New York art critic Donald Kuspit from 1987 to 1992 and focused much critical writing on Chicago art history and Expressionism with articles appearing in Art on Paper, the Chicago Artist’s Coalition News, and the New Art Examiner.  Her work has been collected by The Milwaukee Museum of Art, The Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, The Block Museum in Evanston Illinois, The Koehnline Museum in the Chicago Area and The Strake Jesuit Museum in Houston, Texas among many others.

@Thomas Masters Gallery
245 W. North Ave.
Chicago, IL 60610

Gallery hours: Wed- Sun: 12-5pm

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