Sari DIENES

Sari Dienes (Sarolta Maria Anna Chylinska ) was born in Debrecen (1898), had a career that spanned six decades, during which she pioneered assemblage art and explored a diverse range of media, including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, textile design, music, and performance. Despite her profound influence, her contributions were often overshadowed by the male artists she inspired. EARLY YEARS   In her teens pursued dance lessons in Budapest with Valéria Dienes, who was married to poet and mathematician Paul Dienes. Sari and Paul became romantically involved and married in 1922. The couple moved frequently for his work, living at times in Austria, Wales, and London. Beginning in the late 1920s through 1935, Sari Dienes - the name she used professionally - studied painting in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne and with André Lhote. In 1936 she became the assistant director of the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, London, and was in charge of recruiting new students, who included Leonora Carrington and Stella Snead. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since the early 1940s, with notable exhibitions at the storied Betty Parsons Gallery and later as a founding member of the Feminist collective, A.I.R. Gallery.  ABOUT HER ART In 1939 she voyaged to New York at Ozenfant’s invitation, but the escalation of hostilities in Europe prevented Dienes from returning to England. She instead resettled in New York, and her studio in the Sherwood Studios building on Fifty-Seventh Street was a meeting point for the avant-garde. Her first solo show of drawings occurred in 1942 at the New School for Social Research, and this exhibition may be where she initially encountered Hayter and Atelier 17. She worked at the studio between 1949 and 1952. Always a consummate networker, Dienes befriended many Atelier 17 members and exhibited her prints regularly with the studio (at the Laurel Gallery, Peretz Johnnes Bookshop and Gallery, Show more