six gallery press
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Michael Hafftka is a visual artist whose work has been written about perceptively and generously. Sam Hunter, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Princeton University, and John Caldwell, Curator at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, in their catalogue introductions to Hafftka’s shows at the DiLaurenti Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University and The Housatonic Museum of Art, explore Hafftka’s rich and complex relationship with his chosen masters in the Western tradition as well as highlighting his striking skill and originality as a painter. Hafftka was born in Manhattan in 1953. In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, he volunteered to work on a Kibbutz in Israel and there he began to paint. In 1975 he returned to New York. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In the early eighties Hafftka was commissioned to do a number of book covers for Urizen Books. This lead to the publication by Guignol Books of both Michael Hafftka - Selected Drawings and Art of Experience - Experience Of Art, an extended critical essay. In 1982 Barbara Flynn of Art Galaxy offered Hafftka his first one-person show. Among the galleries in New York at which he has subsequently had one person shows are the Rosa Esman Gallery, the Aberbach Gallery, the Mary Ryan Gallery and the DiLaurenti Gallery. His work has also been extensively shown elsewhere both in the US and abroad. Hafftka’s work is in the collections of: Museum of Modern art, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Brooklyn Museum, New York Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA New York Public Library Collection, New York San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, TX Arizona State University Art Museum National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Photo by Vilma Tirado |