Alan Turner, Artist of the
Evocative and the Odd, Dies at 76
Alan Turner, who drew on Surrealism, Abstract
Expressionism and more in acclaimed paintings and drawings that could be
humorous, disturbing or poignant, died on Feb. 8 at his loft in Lower
Manhattan. He was 76.
The poet Lee Briccetti, his partner of almost 20 years, said the cause
was progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative brain disorder. He had been
in home hospice care for some years.
Mr. Turner’s art was widely exhibited and wide
ranging. In the late 1970s he produced mesmerizing paintings of trees “that
seemed to square off like fighters or wrap themselves around one another in a
claustrophobic embrace,” as Michael Brenson put it in a review in The New York
Times.
Then came
works featuring humanoid figures and faces, the eyes, ears and other body parts
distorted or bizarrely placed. “Several noses cohabit on a single torso,” Grace
Glueck wrote in The Times in 2000, describing an exhibition at the Lennon,
Weinberg gallery in SoHo, “an eye doubles as a nose, and a vaginal cleft seams
the long flat chin of a grotesque monster face.”
In recent
years, spurred by cardboard shelters in the homeless encampments along the
Tiber River that he saw on his frequent trips to Rome, he developed a “Box
House” series, mostly in graphite, that explored not only those but all sorts
of boxes that harbor all sorts of things, whether people, pets or memories.
Alan Lee Turner was born on July 6, 1943, in the Bronx. “I
was to be named after my father’s father,” he wrote in an autobiographical
sketch in the catalog for a 2018 retrospective at the Parker Gallery in Los
Angeles, “but his name had been Adolph, which did not seem a good name for a
Jewish boy to be brought up in the Bronx in 1943.”
His father,
Louis, operated the projector at the Lane movie theater in Washington Heights
in Manhattan, and his mother, Rose (Taylor) Turner, worked at Stern’s
department store.
Mr. Turner enrolled at City College, where he
was on the fencing team. He started out as a mathematics major but changed to
art, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1965. He then earned a master’s degree at
the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. The artist David Hockney was
among his teachers.
Alan Turner è venuto a Lucoli molte volte, così come all'Aquila ed ha vissuto con noi tutta la fase del post terremoto.
Ha fatto parte della rete di personaggi della cultura stranieri che hanno contribuito a far conoscere all'estero l'esperienza del Giardino della Memoria.
Alan ha passeggiato con noi molte volte per le vie dei borghi di Lucoli, disegnando ogni cosa: i muri, ogni ferita del terremoto, le pietre nude e ogni particolare della vita sospesa che lo colpiva.
Ci ha aiutati quando ci siamo costituiti in Associazione ed ha adottato una pianta di melo nel Giardino della Memoria del Sisma.
Se n'è andato un grande e colto amico sempre interessato alle esperienze italiane ed abruzzesi dalle quali traeva spunto per i suoi quadri.
Grande la sua umanità, grande la sua sensibilità, grande la sua affettività.
Ci lascia un grande vuoto anche se ci rimane la sua pianta che cureremo con grande affetto.
 |
| I frutti del "Melo Cotogno" di Alan e Lee |
Ciao Amico Alan
nella foto anche la scrittrice Rose Hayden
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/design/alan-turner-dead.html
https://www.artforum.com/news/alan-turner-1943-2020-82396
https://contemporaryartdaily.com/2019/01/alan-turner-at-parker-gallery/
