Edda Renouf

Place: Mexico City

Born: 1943

Biography:

Edda Renouf (born 1943) is an American painter and printmaker. Renouf creates minimalist abstract paintings and drawings developed from her close attention to subtle properties of materials, such as the woven threads in linen canvas and the flax and cotton fibers of paper. Renouf often alters these supports by removing threads from the weave of a canvas, or in her drawings, creating lines by incising the paper. Renouf was born in Mexico City in 1943, the daughter of Edward Renouf, an artist, and his wife, Catharine Innes (Smith) Renouf. She studied from 1961 to 1965 at Sarah Lawrence College (BA 1965), from 1967 to 1968 at the Art Students League, and from 1968 to 1971 at Columbia University School of the Arts (MFA 1971). While earning her MFA, Renouf studied with several visiting artists including Richard Pousette-Dart, Carl Andre, and Jack Tworkov. After graduating, Renouf received a painting fellowship from Columbia University that allowed her to live and work in Paris for a year. It was during this period that Renouf met dealer Yvon Lambert who, impressed by her work, gave Renouf her first solo exhibition in 1972. Renouf has lived in New York and Paris since 1972. She divides her time between her studios in Paris and Washington Depot, CT, with her husband, Alain Middleton, a composer. Yvon Lambert Gallery represented Renouf until 1993. Renouf had her first solo exhibition in the United States with Blum Helman Gallery, New York in 1978. They represented Renouf in the United States until 2002. She is represented by Annely Juda Fine Art, London in Europe and by Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York in the United States. Renouf was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1990. In 1997, Renouf was the subject of a major retrospective at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., also presented a solo exhibition of Renouf's work in 2004 titled Revealed Structures. A catalogue was published alongside the exhibition.