BIOGRAPHY

Artist Carmela C. Grunwaldt began defining her approach to work during the Great Depression, when artists of her generation were questioning traditional approaches to making art and exploring modernism. She was forward-thinking in her approach to the creative process, working in media including painting, drawing, collage, found materials, paper and canvas, and often using the sewing machine as an instrument for drawing. Major influences were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and Lee Krasner. 

Grunwaldt was born Carmela Cirone in Chicago in 1915. She studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, then moved to New York, where she worked as an illustrator and textile designer. In 1946 she married Carlos Grunwaldt and moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she continued practicing her love of painting while working as a commercial artist and designer. In 1954 she returned to the United States, settling in Southern California and working as a freelance textile designer for Olga, Catalina, Cole of California, Jantzen and Vera. 

With studios in Sierra Madre and Pasadena, Grunwaldt initially worked in oil but switched to acrylic as soon as it was easily accessible. She stitched her mixed-media works on an electrified treadle sewing machine that had belonged to her seamstress mother, threading it incorrectly to create unpredictable lines. Rarely dating (and only occasionally titling) her compositions, Grunwaldt described her work as the result of balancing intuition and reason through the shifting relationships of form, color and texture. She often used chalk, oil pastels, watercolor, ink and crayons to augment the interplay of surface and subsurface activity.

Grunwaldt was a signature member of the National Watercolor Society and a member of the Los Angeles Art Association’s Gallery 825 and the Pasadena Society of Artists. Her work has been exhibited in local and national museums and galleries and has won numerous awards. It is included in the collection of the Brand Library Art Gallery in Glendale, California, and many private collections. Carmela Grunwaldt died in Pasadena, California, in 2007.

–Maria Rosa Keys