Overview
Norman Kanter was a New York based painter and a pioneer in the teeming Tribeca area of lower Manhattan where he lived in a neighborhood loft on Chambers Street from 1960 until his death. Although Kanter lived and worked in New York City, he maintained his Bay Area ties, returning often to take visiting teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Oakland Museum and the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Mentored by the German born and influential art teacher Hans Hofmann who created volumes through dynamic planes of color, Kanter painted canvases that balanced a Classical tranquility and intensity and reflected the advent of Abstract Expressionism. Kanter worked during a time when such gestural works marked a break with past accepted formulas and resonated with a world who was open to looking on the art of this new age with fresh eyes.
Selected Exhibitions
1953 Chicago Graphic Workshop, Chicago, Illinois
1953 Six Gallery, San Francisco, California
1954 Forum Gallery, New York
1955 Oakland Museum, Oakland, California
1956, '57, '60 San Francisco Museum of Art
1958 Provincetown Art Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts
1959 Martha Jackson Gallery, New York City, The New York Scene
1959, '60 Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, California
1959, '60 Area Gallery, New York City
1961 Esther Stuttman Gallery, New York City, Spanish Refugee Aid
1962 Gordon Gallery, New York City, The X Series
1964 Berkeley Gallery, Berkeley, California
1968 Van Der Voort Gallery, San Francisco, California
1970 Libre Gallery, Gardiner, Colorado, A Painting in Landscape
1978 Provincetown Art Museum, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Days Studios
1980 Landmark Gallery, New York City
1981, '82 Bayonne Community Center, Bayonne, New Jersey
1984 Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, California, The Dilexi Years 1958-1970
1996, '98 Drawing Loft, New York City
2001-2004 Studio 18 Gallery, New York City
2005 Holland Tunnel, Paros, Greece, Labyrinth
2007 143 Chambers Street Studio, New York City, Retrospective