Eleanore Mikus

Eleanore Mikus is an American artist who began painting in the late 1950s in the Abstract Expressionist mode. By the early 1960s, she was creating monochromatic paintings with geometric patterns that according to Luis Camnitzer, could be seen as conforming to the Minimalist aesthetic of the era while emphatically contradicting that styles emotional distance and coldness.In 1969, she began painting simple, cartoonlike images in bold, colorful strokes that anticipated NeoExpressionism of the early 1980s. In the mid1980s, Mikus resumed creating her abstract works. Since 1961, she has also been creating works of folded paper in which the folds make lines or textures that become integral to the material itself.

Mikus was born in Detroit. She was drawn to art at an early age winning an art prize in kindergarten and attending art classes at the School of Arts and Crafts in Detroit while in high school. After three years at Michigan State University, majoring in art and art history, Mikus left in 1950 to travel in Germany and Austria. She returned to the United States in 1953 and completed her undergraduate degree in art and art history at the University of Denver in 1957. In 1959, she took classes at the Art Students League and New York University and later completed an M.A. in Asian Art History at the University of Denver in 1967. Mikus lived in New York City from 19601972 and again from 19771979. She began teaching at Cooper Union in New York in 1971. From 19731976, she taught and lived in England. In 1979, she moved to Ithaca, New York, while still maintaining her studio in New York City. Mikus taught at Cornell University until she retired in 1994.

Source: Wikipedia