Carmen Cicero is now in the midst of his seventh decade in the contemporary art world of New York City. His works of the 1950s—collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and other major museums—combined the gestures of Abstract Expressionism with the complex emergent forms of Surrealist automatism. In the 1960s, Cicero was one of the first members of the American avant-garde to return to figuration, pursuing, through the 1960s and 1970s, a style called “figurative expressionism.” This evolved, beginning in the 1990s, into his more recent “visionary” mode, in which he depicts, with a startling clarity, mysterious scenes animated by multiple contradictory feelings—unfulfilled desires, jealousy, despair, and isolation—as well as a generous dose of humor.

Carmen Cicero was born on August 14, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey. From 1947 to 1951, Cicero attended the New Jersey State Teachers College (now Kean University), Newark, and in 1953, he briefly pursued graduate work in painting at Hunter College, New York, studying with Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. The two abstract painters and their circle of artists, poets, and musicians were immensely influential for Cicero, whose singular explorations of abstraction coalesced within the overarching New York school of his teachers and friends.

Carmen Cicero is both a painter and jazz musician. Early in Cicero’s career, he achieved success as an abstract expressionist, but after a disastrous fire in his studio in 1971, where he lost everything, he moved to New York’s SoHo district and turned to a new form of expression, more storytelling and figurative expressionist. Cicero said: 

“I did not want to be a second-generation Abstract Expressionist,
I wanted to be a first-generation Cicero.” 

“Carmen Cicero is a born storyteller,” notes David Ebony, Curator of this exhibition.  “As the musician he can convey feelings and even various types of human interactions, from tense confrontations to romantic encounters, by means of a sequence of hot riffs on his saxophone or clarinet…In conversation, Cicero spins lively and comically nuanced stories of people, places, and novel situations, imparting these tales in his visual art….The images he presents are full of dramatic proposals, complex, social conundrum, and intriguing innuendo. Yet to complete the story, viewers are invited to find their own way to absorb, navigate, and reflect upon the quixotic ingredients he offers.  The tale becomes the viewer’s as much as the artist’s.”

To date, Carmen Cicero has had over 70 solo exhibitions, been in over 220 group exhibitions and included in 33 museums (including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn Museum).

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Information excerpted from: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/Carmen-Cicero