Edward Renouf
American, 1906 - 1999 Edward Renouf was born in Hsiku, China. As an adult he studied art in New York City and practiced Surrealism until a gallery owner recommended that he travel south and collaborate with the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalan who was developing a breakaway group of Surrealists in Mexico City. In Mexico Renouf worked with Paalen on the group’s journal, DYN, which was published in six installments between 1942 and 1944. His first published DYN art appeared in DYN no. 2. This was Hellbird, an ink drawing with blocky Mexican iconography. Most of the artists in Paalen’s orbit were Europeans who had been fleeing the war but representatives of the New York art world visited regularly, among them Robert Motherwell. Motherwell, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollock all contributed to DYN. Renouf ‘s artwork was influenced by Paalen’s attempts to merge European art techniques with ideas from science, nature, and indigenous non- European cultures. He eventually returned to the United States and moved to Connecticut where he joined the Washington Art Association. The Association’s website notes that during the 1950s he “was prolific and worked in a broad range of media. He was most noted for his assemblages.” By 1973 he was working on canvases covered with dense scribbled scratches worked through black paint. Renouf was introduced to the Vogels by his daughter Edda, whose work also appears in their collection. He died in Connecticut at the age of ninety-three.