Archivio Conz

Sari Dienes (1898 Debrecen, Hungary–1992 Stony Point, New York, USA) was a genre-defying artist who, by pioneering the most diverse mediums in over sixty years of artistic activity, inspired a whole generation of American artists with her unique sensibility. Beginning in the 1940s, Dienes taught drawing and composition in New York at Parsons School of Design and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Her studio quickly became a gathering site for artists such as Mark Rothko, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Earle Brown, and Jackson Mac Low. Her trip to southwestern United States in 1947 provided new impulses for Dienes’s aesthetic, inspired by the surrealness of nature and its textures and especially its silent remnants, side by side with the debris of modernity. The attraction to the found object would make Dienes a pioneer in the assemblage technique. Dienes was also closely associated with Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik, also participating in numerous editions of Charlotte Moorman’s Annual Avant Garde Festival. Her free spirit and unconventional approach inspired Francesco Conz, who discovered a series of her early drawings while visiting Dienes together with Ben Patterson. Dienes' work has been included in numerous exhibitions at, among others, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1971), The Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum (each serval times), the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), the Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, New York (2020), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021).