Eleanore Mikus

Eleanore Mikus
Mikus in the 1960s
Born	(1927-07-25) July 25, 1927 (age 89)
Nationality	American
Known for	Conceptual art, Humanist
Awards	Guggenheim Fellow

Eleanore Mikus (born July 25, 1927 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American artist who began painting in the late 1950s in the Abstract Expressionist mode. By the early 1960s, she was creating monochromatic paintings with geometric patterns that according to Luis Camnitzer, “could be seen as conforming to the Minimalist aesthetic of the era while emphatically contradicting that style’s emotional distance and coldness.” In 1969, she began painting simple, cartoon-like images in bold, colorful strokes that anticipated Neo-Expressionism of the early 1980s. In the mid-1980s, Mikus resumed creating her abstract works. Since 1961, she has also been creating works of folded paper in which the “folds” make lines or textures that become integral to the material itself.

Mikus was born in Detroit. She was drawn to art at an early age winning an art prize in kindergarten and attending art classes at the School of Arts and Crafts in Detroit while in high school. After three years at Michigan State University, majoring in art and art history, Mikus left in 1950 to travel in Germany and Austria. She returned to the United States in 1953 and completed her undergraduate degree in art and art history at the University of Denver in 1957. In 1959, she took classes at the Art Students League and New York University and later completed an M.A. in Asian Art History at the University of Denver in 1967. Mikus lived in New York City from 1960–1972 and again from 1977-1979. She began teaching at Cooper Union in New York in 1971. From 1973-1976, she taught and lived in England. In 1979, she moved to Ithaca, New York, while still maintaining her studio in New York City. Mikus taught at Cornell University until she retired in 1994.

Mikus had her first solo exhibition at the Pietrantonia Gallery in New York in 1960. She showed paintings of geometric shapes on sectional canvases to allow the real lines of the joined canvases to interact with the painted shapes on the surfaces. In 1963, she exhibited at Pace Gallery in Boston. Later in New York City, she was making monochromatic works of black, white, and gray painted on uneven supports made from pieces of wood fitted together. Thickly painted and sanded many times so that the color became like a skin molded by and integral to the bumpy structure beneath, these works, called Tablets are distinguished by a play of light and shadow on the surfaces that provides an organic sense of movement. Her show at Pace Gallery also coincided with the beginning of her “paperfolds” (the term she uses for her works of folded paper). When asked to design an announcement for the show in N.Y.C., she spontaneously made seven folds on a sheet a paper, opened it up and handed it over as the flyer. From that point on, folding paper became an important part of her creative process.