Fact Sheet: Adolf Dietrich

Adolf Dietrich (1877–1957), one of the most reknowned Swiss artists of the 20th Century, focused his work on his own surroundings, rendering rural landscapes, portraits, animals, and still lives, with an extreme amount of precision and detail, strong use of color, and a striking sense of materiality. Dietrich's largest audience during his lifetime was in Germany, and he was included in exhibitions of New Romanticism and New Objectivity there as well as in France and Switzerland. Yet, with the rise of National Socialism, Dietrich's market, and thus his fame, became more localized to Switzerland. In his ongoing interest in the contructions of art history, and in homage to the techniques he admires, Richard Phillips curated the elder painted into a recent show at the Swiss Institute, called "Painting and Misappropriation." Here are the facts on Dietrich, with invaluable help from Phillips:
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Fact Sheet: R Crumb

Cartoon artist R Crumb (b. 1943, Philadelphia)is best known for his scatalogical ink drawings for mainstream magazines like Rolling Stone to accompany the work of Hunter S Thompson, and the seminal journal he founded, Zap. So his latest project, a fully illustrated comic-style rendering of the Book of Genesis, comprised of 207 individual works in pen and ink,might surprise you. Currently on view at David Zwirner (through April 17), the illustrations have taken Crumb five years to complete. Here are the facts on Crumb.

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Fact Sheet: Hunter Cross

Transparency Now, Hunter Cross' debut New York solo show, was recently on view at the Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side. It captured, the artist said, an aesthetic, "similar to what you might see under a microscope, if that microscope happened to be rendered out by Adobe Illustrator." At the age of 29, Cross is at the forefront of a generation of artists formed by the Internet and ideas of collective production and consumption. Cross floats seamlessly between the many vocations he claims—artist, web developer, entrepreneur, and musician—and makes the roles seem like natural corollaries. Here are the facts on Cross:
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Fact Sheet: Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) is best known for the her obsessively reworked, giant abstract painting, The Rose, which she completed between the years of 1958 and 1966 until it had to be removed from her home with a forklift. It's a striking, sublime amount of labor—it's also a strange monument to a woman artist spending extreme amounts of time isolated in her home. DeFeo is one of the few women associated with the California Beat Generation of the 1950s and 1960s: It's rumored that she changed her name to Jay so that people in the art world would mistake her for a man. As The Rose might suggest, DeFeo was a prolific producer—but in a surprising variety of media, including photography and drawing. Her work was often abstract and emotional, but show evidence of DeFeo's meticulous and compulsive process. Here are the facts on DeFeo:
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