John Kacere

After starting his career as abstract painter (1950 to 1963), John moved on to a realistic style. Since then, he has been regarded as a major Photo-realist or Hyper-realist. Attending art school in Chicago from 1938 through 1940, he studied commercial art at first. Exposure to fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums, however, inspired Kacere to shift the direction of his own work to the fine arts. At first, Kacere was especially interested in the work of Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. He also cites Holbein and Ingres as favorite artists. Before he entered the army, Kacere held his first one-man show in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Stationed in California during the war years, he began to study the work of the European moderns: Picasso, Miro, Klee and Matisse. Upon leaving the army, Kacere studied fine arts at the University of Iowa. He began his teaching career in 1950 at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Since then he has taught at the University of Florida, Arizona State University, the Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, the University of New Mexico, and Cooper Union and the Parsons School of Design in New York City. He showed abstract paintings at Zabriskie Gallery throughout the ’50s. In the ’60s he showed at Allan Stone Gallery. In 1971, he began the series of large paintings for which he is best known, Photo-Realist depictions of the female torso clad only in sheer lingerie. Numerous exhibitions of these works were presented at New York’s O.K. Harris Gallery. Kacere does not consider himself a photo-realist, although his highly detailed work is sometimes called photo-or hyper-realistic. Unlike the photo-realist painters, who work from detail to detail of their canvases, Kacere works on all areas of the canvas at the same time and builds up layers of paint. Kacere has held had many one man shows in New York City. He has also shown in Paris and Hamburg, and his work has been enthusiastically received in Europe.