This artist does not have an image.

Print This Page

Deborah Oropallo
Painting
American
(Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954 - )
2007
High Fiber, The Katzen American University Museum, Washington, D.C.

2006
Paul G. Allen Foundation grant in support of solo show at Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho

2005
Pollack-Krasner Foundation Award Recipient

1998
Modern Masters Award from the Museum of Art and Environment, Frank Lloyd Wright Marin County Civic Center, California

1993
Fleischhacker Award

1991
National Endowment for the Arts Award

1990
Art Space, Grant, San Francisco, CA
California Arts Council Grant

1988
Art Space, Support Grant, San Francisco, CA

1987
Engelhard Award, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA

1983
22nd Annual Art Exhibit, HAFA, Second Place, Hayward, CA

1982
Richmond Art Center Award, Small Format Show, Richmond, CA
Ann Bremer Award, University of California, Berkeley, CA

1981
California State Fair Art Exhibition, Honorable Mention, Sacramento, CA
California State Fair Art Exhibition, Second Place, Sacramento, CA

1978
College Register Certificate of Recognition, Alfred University, Alfred, NY
Michael Cory Levins Sculpture Award, Alfred University, Alfred, NY

1977
F.C.-J.C. Fine Art Award, Alfred University, Alfred, NY


View the objects by this artist.

Biography

Deborah Oropallo’s style is distinguished by the tension between the dispassionate manner with which she regards her subject matter, and the sensuality with which she handles her materials. She uses printing techniques and oil paint on canvas to transform mundane objects such as ropes, railroad tracks, steel drums, and doormats into patternlike abstractions. These objects reside in the periphery of our consciousness, yet comprise the texture of our daily lives. They become the focus of Oropallo’s attention—she plucks them from their marginal context and pushes them into the foreground of her paintings until we begin to see the items for what they are: a collection of shapes such as triangles, circles, squares, and crescents.

One of four children born to a traditional Italian-American family, Oropallo grew up in New Jersey. Her parents were first-generation Americans, and her father supported the family with his Italian bakery, where Oropallo worked as a high-school student. This sort of methodical labor has remained a part of her life as she applies her work ethic to painting. She left home to attend Alfred University in New York where she earned a B.F.A. in 1979. Soon after she moved to California to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. Elmer Bischoff was among her instructors, and the expressive brushwork of her early paintings suggests his influence. Oropallo earned her M.F.A. in 1983 and began exhibiting her work regularly. She became known for her paintings suggestive of childhood fears and hopes, featuring imagery such as diagrams from how-to books, illustrations derived from first-aid manuals, articles from newspapers, and text drawn from prayer cards.

Soon after giving birth to her first child, Leo, in 1995, her subject matter began to shift to reflect her immediate surroundings, and she began to paint the objects she encountered in everyday life—the items that fill her home or surround its exterior. Amusement consists of a skillful composition of two elements: plastic toy train tracks and yellow paper tickets of the sort used at zoos, the cinema, or amusement parks. An example of Oropallo’s “flat paintings,” it brings together digital printmaking with traditional painting techniques. The artist silkscreened her subject matter onto the canvas, then painted over the imagery with oil paint, resulting in a shallow yet dynamic pictorial space. The effect of this dramatic canvas is that of an abstract painting, and yet the content of her work is too pronounced to allow the viewer to overlook the fact that she has painted a canvas populated by tickets and toy railroad components—objects often associated with childhood entertainment.

According to art critic Jeff Kelley, “Many painters regard Oropallo’s work as something like a pictorial form of conceptual art. … This is another way of saying her paintings are not of the haptic strain: they are not physical accretions of the painter’s touch or material extensions of the artist’s body. We do not read them for their strokes, drips, scuffs, nicks, scrapings, or weathered surfaces. Rather, their sensuality … hovers at an optical range, where one’s sense of the physical nature of the object gives way to the primacy of its visual subject.”1 Oropallo’s paintings combine machinelike replication with the soulfulness of one-of-a-kind fine art. Her works combine the hands-on passion of modernism with the distancing stance of postmodernism, resulting in a thoroughly contemporary take on painting—one that neither commits itself to the sensual nature of the medium, nor is able to fully deny its pull. —J.N.

1. Jeff Kelley, “Deborah Oropallo: Making Contact,” How To: The Art of Deborah Oropallo, exh. cat. (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 2002), 19.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Deborah Oropallo was born into a large, traditional Italian family in Hackensack, New Jersey in the 1950s, and her first exposure to art was through the How to Draw manuals of Walter T. Foster. She received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 and had her first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which honored her with the Engelhard Award. Her work has been included in several major group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial in 1989 and the Corcoran Gallery’s Biennial in 1993. In 1999, she was included in the group exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2001, SJMA organized a mid-career survey titled How To: The Art of Deborah Oropallo. This will be the second work by Oropallo in the SJMA’s collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)


Your current search criteria is: Artist is "Deborah Oropallo".