Kiki Brodkin, 1926-2010: A Fond Farewell to a Fine Artist

By Ed McCormack, Gallery & Studio magazine

Kiki and Ed Brodkin.

One always thought of Kiki Brodkin and her husband Ed Brodkin as a model artist couple, working together in their home studios in Paramus, New Jersey, far from the hubbub and hype of the New York art scene, but very much a part of it through their frequent exhibitions in Chelsea, where they were both members of Pleiades Gallery.

Like Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, the Brodkins were very different kinds of artists; yet they were kindred spirits and always staunch supporters of each others’ work.

“Kiki never settled on one particular technique or look that would become formulaic,” Ed told a staff writer for the obituary page of The Record, a New Jersey newspaper. “She wanted to try different things.”

Since style, as someone once said, is character and Kiki had plenty of that, there was no need to cultivate something so superficial as a “look.” As her husband put it in the same article, “She was without artifice. She didn’t tolerate any form of innuendo and was never afraid of saying what she felt. People loved that.”

Those are qualities that a thoughtful man like Ed Brodkin, especially, falls in love with. Add that Kiki was still a sophomore at Cooper Union and he a newly worldly veteran just back from overseas with a Purple Heart, and you have all the ingredients for a perfect postwar romance. But Kiki was more than just another 1940s ingenue with grit. The marriage flourished for six decades, as the couple raised three sons and grew together as artists, only ending when Kiki died on April 1 of this year of complications resultings resulting from a 2008 automobile accident.

Fortunately for us all, Kiki Brodkin’s spirit, energy, and honesty live on in her rugged abstract sculptures, her contrastingly ethereal encaustic paintings, and the bold digital prints that she took on at a time in life when most artists are reluctant to experiment with the new technology.

“How wonderful it is to reach into the unknown to call up the poetic power of magical visual imagery,” the artist stated with characteristic enthusiasm in connection with her solo exhibition “Wax and Wood,” at Pleiades Gallery in 2006.

Although she also worked in stone, this show focused on her sculptures in carved wood and her encaustic paintings, both of which are impressive in very different ways. The sculptures are sensuous of surface and sensual of form, projecting a sense of scale much more expansive than their actual dimensions and commanding space with an authoritativeness usually only found in larger works. The encaustic paintings have a luster quite the opposite of Jasper Johns’ rather dry handling of the ancient medium, with a chromatic radiance emanating from within their layered surfaces that suggests the term “lightscapes.”

Kiki Brodkin, who exhibited in numerous venues in New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Germany, as well as in a Biennial in Korea, was an artist whose work warrants serious consideration, now more than ever.

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