After serving seven years as an officer in the U.S. Army, Thomas Gruenebaum launched a successful career as a stockbroker on Wall Street between 1960 and 1974. During this period he always painted as he had during his Bolivian childhood. In 1974 he opened the Gruenebaum Gallery in Soho. His stable included some of the finest artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. This immersion in the New York art community made him realize that his own work should be shown. In 1987 Ingber Gallery in Soho exhibited his “Soho Wall Series.” These works consist of bits and pieces of posters and billboards collaged onto plywood and overlaid with oil stick and splattered paint. Later he cannibalized his own earlier work – linocuts, drawings, paintings – to create newly rich impasto paintngs from layers of discarded material. In 1988 his “Las Series Cabaret” was exhibited at 112 Green Street. This exhibition was curated by Peter Selz, art critic/author and former curator at The Museum of Modern Art. Evoking Berlin café life under the Weimar Republic, the imagery is reminiscent of scenes in the famous German film ‘The Blue Angel.” Selz described these paintings, with their depictions of grotesque café sirens, as having “a sense of sumptuous plumage (sic).” Small abstract collages, begun in 1991, presage the larger, more luminous abstractions featured in Gruenebaum’s solo exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes in San Miquel de Allende. Mexico, where he had moved in 1994. However the Mexican abstractions are softer, warmer and more beguiling in their textures than the earlier works inspired by the English painter Nicholas de Stael. They epitomize what Ft. Lauderdale museum director George S. Bolge once called Gruenebaum’s “long song of praise to sight and gathering freshness.” Selected Exhibitions: 1987: Ingber Gallery, New York; Elaine Horwitch Gallery, Palm Springs, California; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina; 1988: “112 Green Street,” New York; 1989: Government Center, West Palm Beach; 1990: Palm Beach International Airport; 1992: Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, Florida; 21st Gallery, Naples, Florida, 1996: Institute Allende, San Miguel de Allende; Museo de Bellas Artes, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Selected Collections: General Electric, Palm Beach International Airport, University of North Carolina, Art & Culture Center, Hollywood, Florida.

 

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