CHARLES BIEDERMAN

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Charles Biederman 

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Abstract artist and theorist Charles Biederman began his career as a painter in Paris and New York in the 1930s. Although his biomorphic abstractions were praised by critics and included in important exhibits, Biederman rejected involvement with the art establishment and settled in rural Red Wing, Minnesota in 1942. Living and working in voluntary isolation from global art centers, he refined his Cubist and Constructivist-influenced works into three-dimensional wall works with a "machine aesthetic" of industrial materials and surfaces, wires, strings, primary colors and other modern means. 

Biederman's signature works of later decades are painted aluminum reliefs, in which small rectangular elements project from a flat vertical surface at varying angles. Meticulously crafted, the multicolored pieces combine Mondrian-like composition with the little third dimension of low-relief sculpture.

Biederman wrote and self-published a number of densely philosophical treatises on art and nature, including "Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge" (1948), "The New Cezanne: From Monet to Mondriaan" (1958) and "Search for New Arts" (1979). An archive of Biederman's artworks and papers is at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.