Abraham Joel Tobias

I visited The Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum today and fell in love with Abraham Joel Tobias's sculptures. These irregularly shaped art work has lot of meaning in them. I thought I can find his art work picture in the website. However, not much here. I should have take pictures of what I've seen. They are amazing, I'll post photos if I visit the museum next time. The following text was copied from The Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum website "In the modern era, artists have sometimes used irregularly shaped surfaces to explore compositional possibilities beyond those offered by the traditional rectangle. The shaping of easel paintings by artists for independent, formalist purposes essentially began in the twentieth century with the first significant art historical attention paid to shaped canvases occurred in the 1960s. However, in 1934-35, Abraham Joel Tobias created and exhibited an extraordinary group of works he called “sculptural paintings” that integrated shaped canvases and complex framing devices, both conditioned by the imagery they contained. With their complex yet coherent interplay of imagery, construction, and composition, the sculptural paintings are uniquely innovative works within the history of American art. Recently, the artist’s widow, Carolyn, enhanced her previous donation of Tobias’ City Landscape with a gift of three additional works, as well as two long-term loans. All are sculptural paintings except for one circular painting. The Zimmerli is pleased to display these works in gratitude for a generous donation, and in honor of the achievements of a highly original American artist." This photo is also copied from museum website, one of the sculpture I saw and loved.