"[1] Today, as other artists have been carefully folded into the same paradoxical genre, Krushenick is not only considered a singular figure within that style but also its pioneer, earning him the title "the father of Pop abstraction.
Later that year, having become frustrated with the internal politics of Camino, the brothers left and opened a framing shop in a nearby storefront, which quickly turned into the artists' cooperative Brata Gallery.
With members including Al Held, Ronald Bladen, Ed Clark, Yayoi Kusama, and George Sugarman, Brata was "one of the most significant of the Tenth Street cooperatives which for a time were the most important launching pads for new artists.
In 1967, he gave solo shows in New York City and Paris as well as in Detroit, Michigan, and Vienna, Austria, while also receiving a fine arts fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
The companion book to Graphicstudio: Contemporary Art from the Collaborative Workshop at the University of South Florida, a 1991 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, notes that "Krushenick began to experiment with screenprinting in the late 1950s and became an active printmaker by the mid-1960s," including during a 1965 fellowship at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles (which has since moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and been rebranded as the Tamarind Institute).
[11] At Tamarind, "he completed twenty-two lithographs during his two-month tenure," which, still featuring the more organic and undulating forms that marked Krushenick's earliest mature paintings, can be viewed here.
In his 1971 Fire-Flash-Five-Fade suite of six serigraphs, Krushenick compresses and sharpens his trademark black lines into jagged bolts of electricity or shark's teeth.
He then embarked, after many visiting stints at various institutions during the prior decade, on his only long-term engagement as an educator, serving as a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1977 to 1991.
This rebellion would eventually drive that style out of fashion, leading to numerous simultaneous movements that continue to interest artists, critics, historians and collectors today.
Whether this is because he anticipated the movement and now looks more official, or because he's using acrylic colors, or simply because everyone to an extent becomes a victim of the audience's compulsion to organize artists into groups, I can't tell.
However, his increasingly monumental works did find inspiration in cartoon illustration, and many critics interpreted the subject matter as more or less covertly sexual—often as vulvar and penetrative.
As John Perreault observed in a feature story that year, "In spite of the hard black, coloring-book lines that divide one shape or super-color from another, the neat flatness, and the often symmetrical composition, these paintings are systematic visual manifestations of the emotionally organic, executed with cool precision, but conceived with great gusto.
As Corinne Robins noted in 1975, "The new paintings, like the old, have a tonal feeling; but now, rather than the blare of trumpets, the buzz of an IBM machine making crazy computations comes to mind.
By the end of that decade and the start of a new one, yellow began to dominate Krushenick's work, with a renewed attention to intricate details playing out across smaller canvases.