"Ruth Eckstein / Esphyr Slobodkina: Two Friends"
Great Neck Art Center, 5 June 2004 - July 13th 2004

The exhibition of the works of Ruth Eckstein and Esphyr Slobodkina opened Saturday at the Great Neck Center for the Arts (GNAC) to a small but animated group of art enthusiasts. Ruth Eckstein spoke briefly about the show. Recognized among the guests were the Honorable Jeanne Celender, Mayor of Great Neck; renowned jazz photographer William Peter Gotlieb and family; jazz photographer Walter Shap; Anne Cohen DePietro, Chief Curator, Heckscher Museum of Art, Director, Newsday Center for Dove/Torr Studies; AAA abstractionist Marvin Brown.

The creative vision of these TWO FRIENDS rings out through their work. It is fresh, though resonating with a sense of wisdom resulting from years of honing technique and experimentation with varied mediums.

The exhibited works of Esphyr Slobodkina at The Great Neck Art Center are from the Slobodkina Foundation courtesy of Kraushaar Gallery, NYC.  Also included are  pieces from the private collections of Dohn & Micki Schildkraut and Ellen Baer. The works for exhibition were chosen and hung by Harold Porcher of Sage Fine Arts Gallery, NYC and have never been publicly exhibited. Slobodkina's large wall mural The Last Countdown 17' 4" x 47½" painted to celebrate her 80th birthday as an epitaph for herself, is an impressive and magnificent piece that must be seen.

Reviewing a retrospective of Slobodkina's work at the Kraushaar Galleries in Manhattan 2002, Grace Glueck wrote in The New York Times that Ms. Slobodkina's varied works were "all of a creative piece, and a pleasure to behold."

ESPHYR SLOBODKINA (1908-2002) was born in Siberia and  at the age of 11 moved with her family to Manchuria. Esphyr originally aspired to be an engineer, but her love of color, dimension & design sent her in a different direction.  Slobodkina immigrated to the U.S. in 1929 and was a founding member of American Abstract Artists in 1936. Her paintings, sculptures and literary works are part of the collections of The Metropolitan Museum, New York; The National Gallery, Washington, DC; The Smithsonian; The Whitney Museum, New York, The Slobodkina Foundation, NY and more. Slobodkina's murals decorate public facilities around the U.S.

Ruth Eckstein's large relief painting SLOSPEED VII (2002) picks up the theme of ORION, part of the CRETAN suite of frottages of the 1970s: a disk shape moving slowly across a field. Also shown are two large acrylic paintings from her PORTALS series. Phyllis Braff of The New York Times states " A calm intelligence prevails in Ms. Eckstein's acrylic paintings that concentrate on geometrics. Most seem quite stark initially, but the carefully studied adjustments to edges and to rational configuration tend to activate forms and introduce a pushing, a nudging and a general sense of vibration."

RUTH ECKSTEIN, born 1916 in Germany, studied at the New School for Social Research, The Art Students League & Pratt Graphic Arts Center. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Europe & South America. Ms. Eckstein's works may be found in the public collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the British Museum, London; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and scores of other museums throughout the U.S. and Europe. Among her countless Corporate Collectors are AT & T, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Delta Airlines, General Motors and General Electric. Ms. Eckstein is listed in Who's Who in American Art and Who's Who in America.