By the mid-1960s, Robert Duran had established a burgeoning career for himself in New York with several solo shows at Bykert Gallery and inclusion in the 1966 Park Place gallery Invitational, the 1969 Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition, and the first Whitney Biennial in 1973. His works of the 1960s and 70s are characterized by meandering compositions of loosely applied color, often done on unprimed canvas laid on the floor. Like other artists of the time, Duran focused on the pure materiality of the paint and the way it moved around, and soaked into, the canvas. His formal language contained organic glyphs and shapes, stained areas, and roughly rendered geometric forms that covered the canvas in allover compositions that appear both totally free and improvised, and yet somehow meticulously arranged based on their own internal logic. By the 1980s, Duran had retreated from the art world to raise a family. It is only recently that his career has begun to be re-examined. Duran’s work is included in the collections of MoMA, New York, and the Empire State Plaza Art Collection, New York, among others.
