Noel Reifel Art for Sale at Auction

b. 1948 -

Born in New York City in 1948, Noel Reifel was raised in the city, Long Island, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, before returning to New York to study art at Pratt Institute.

After graduation he worked as a free-lance graphic designer and illustrator and taught at Pratt and The Printmaking Workshop (Blackburn’s) before coming to Kent State University to teach printmaking and drawing in 1976. Reifel has been a member of the Board of Trustees of Zygote Press, Inc. since its inception in 1997.

Reifel’s work concentrates primarily in the areas of the intaglio and relief print. His approach has ranged from traditional to experimental. Since the 1980’s, Reifel’s work has largely been concerned with combined-media prints resulting in varied editions, often comprised of unique prints.

Since the mid-1970s, Reifel’s work has been exhibited in approximately 235 exhibitions plus an estimated 75 traveling venues in the United States and abroad in twelve countries.

Artist Statement

The prints in this exhibition all have in common that their subject matter is to a

significant extent the printmaking media themselves. This is not to say that my other prints are not about printmaking on some level, nor that all art is not about its medium

to some extent. It is.

Viewers of art tend to look through the medium in search of other levels of content. In a sense, the medium may remain invisible. I find this unfortunate because I feel that viewers of my work have not really seen it until they realize that I am pursuing ideas and strategies suggested – sometimes insisted upon – by the medium. Chief among these is the fact that prints are multiples. This simple fact has some very interesting implications for the print as visual communication, cultural artifact, etc. But to me the idea of multiple as variant is especially important. By this I mean that an edition may consist of prints that are all different, rather than all identical as we have come to expect. When thought of this way, the fluidity and malleability of print media present infinite possibilities for exploration and discovery. And so, a career.