Gerome Kamrowski's career spans the course of 20th century art in America. He began studying art in the early 1930's in his native Minnesota at the St. Paul Art School. His endeavors took him to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and then to New York after studying with Hans Hoffman and being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In New York he would go on to work with some of the most important artists of the 20th century and be at the forefront of American Abstract painting. His sixty-plus-year career has produced an oeuvre of extraordinary quality and variety.

Like many young American artists Kamrowski was attracted to the precepts of the Surrealists who had been exiled to New York in the late 1930's and early 1940's. He had been working with automatic technique for several years after being exposed to Surrealist literature. He first met William Baziotes and Jackson Pollock while working as a muralist for the Federal Art Project. They began experimenting with automatism and collaborated on several canvases. After hearing of Gordon Onslow Ford's historic lectures at The New School for Social Research, he began working closely with Roberto Matta and the other Surrealist émigrés. Kamrowski's American counterparts included William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Jimmy Ernst. In this period of the early forties an open-ended movement composed of European exiles and young American painters referred to as abstract surrealism began. It would prove to be the beginnings of abstract expressionism.

Gerry was one of the few American artists to be included in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century in 1943. He has also had shows at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951 and at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art on several occasions. In 1947 Paris hosted the international Surrealist Exhibition; Kamrowski was asked to show by the Surrealist leader Andre Breton.
Andre Breton watched his evolution closely. Breton said of Kamrowski, "Gerome Kamrowski is the one who has impressed me the most by reason of the quality and sustained character of his research." Motherwell regarded him as the most Surreal of the American painters. In 1946 he returned to Minnesota then moved to Ann Arbor to begin a career as a professor of art at The University of Michigan. Very few of his students over the next fifty years realized that their teacher was one of the most important artists in America. He worked every single day at his art. He created massive domes of oil on canvas and brought strange, beaded animals to life. Kamrowski's work is an eloquent balance of fluid automatism with plantlike imagery that appeared to be almost microscopic. The application of dozens of layers of paint created a visual maze that clearly communicates an intuitive language with the viewer. His understanding and interest in science was made clear in pieces like Carmen done in 1947. There is a certain amount of commonality throughout his work, as is there a sense of experimentation, originality and evolution.
Gerome Kamrowski was a pioneer painter. He chose a career of teaching and learning as a way to propagate his artwork. Other painters such as Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford and Joan Miró shared a common vision with him. The devotion to that vision has changed the way art is viewed. It also allows us the privilege to look over an entire lifetime worth of work. It is with great honor and respect that Weinstein Gallery presents the life work of Gerome Kamrowski.