Jan Groover
Jan Groover is well known for her formalist still life photographs of household utensils. She attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and graduated in 1965 with a bachelor of fine arts in painting. Groover taught art in public school before enrolling in a master of fine arts program for art education at Ohio State University. Before she developed an interest in photography, Groover devoted much of her time to painting minimalist abstractions. After completing her masters’ degree she accepted a teaching position at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. She then started to take up photography instead of painting. Groover stated, “With photography I didn’t have to make things up, everything was already there."
Groover started creating her first photographs in the late 1970s. These were color diptychs and triptychs depicting vehicles in motion. They were formalist images emphasizing time, distance, speed, and color. When the vehicle was close to the camera the object was blurred and when the vehicle was farther away from the camera the object was sharper. In Groover’s motion studies color played an important role in enhancing the depth of the moving object.
In 1978 Groover turned to her kitchen sink for new ideas. She completely changed the subject matter of her photographs, moving from street scenes out-of-doors to still lifes of household objects. Groover took large color close-ups of objects like stainless-steel utensils, spoons, forks, knives, whisks, spatulas, bowls, glass dishes, red and green peppers, and houseplants. These formalist images were first exhibited at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. She experimented with combinations of objects until a relationship of shapes, colors, and spaces pleased her.
She received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1979 and in 1987, just two decades after she began making photographs, was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which subsequently traveled to other venues. Her work has also been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York and is represented in many international collections. Photographer Tina Barney created a short film about the artist, “Jan Groover: Tilting at Space,” in 1994. Groover and her husband, the painter Bruce Boice, moved to Montpon-Menesterol, France, in 1991. (Bio adapted from information on Holden Luntz Gallery website)
