Sari Dienes is that rare combination, artist, designer, craftsman, a person of vision who know how to construct and how to plan materials of all kinds with equal zest and originality.
—M. C. Richards, 1962
Her work can be said to transcend the locale and the time of her earthly passage.
—Michael Hitzig, 1976
Dienes has been an original talent for eons and anticipated almost everything Robert Rauschenberg ever did—and possibly also Joseph Cornell, at least in terms of technique and experimentation.
—Lawrence Campbell, 1972
Sari Dienes, assemblagist and monument to New York avant-garde durability. . .
—Thomas Ress, 1976
She experiences the multiplicity of life and translated it into visual images which retain or reinforce the mysticism of their own life force. There is magic in their metamorphosis as well as natural, almost biological development.
—Judith Von Baron, 1975
Recently, a young interviewer asked Jasper Johns if Rauschenberg hadn't been a significant influence on his early years. Johns replied, "No, it was Sari Dienes."
—ART JOURNAL, 1977
Sari starts each work as though the world were newly born and she had to create her forms out of the chaos of sand and stone.
—Elise Grilli, 1958
Sari Dienes is one of the great integrators of world visions that we have such need of today.
—Bill Rabinovitch, 1978
As a Japanese, I'm tired of the Japanese work which has already reached its highest peak. But when I see Sari Dienes work, bringing Japanese soil out of a hot oven in a new form, I feel at home. It is more than Japanese for me-it is the spirit of man and nature.
—Hido Cashiro, 1977
Sari Dienes exemplifies the best of the 20th century spirit of experiment, versatility, and free-ranging imagination.
For the past fifty years, Sari Dienes has been in the vanguard of artists who are constantly evolving new forms and new media, independent of art movements and "isms".
As painter, sculptor, collagist, earthworker, assemblagist, and more, she has been called "one of the most inventive artists of recent decades … with a wealth of new ideas still in the process of exploration."
—Judith Von Baron, ARTS MAGAZINE
Indeed, in her 80th year, Sari Dienes' undiminished creative energy is an inspiration to young artists who come to visit with her and experience the vitality of her work and personality. The source of her invention comes partly from her special communion with nature and the environment around her—both of which she incorporates directly into her work. "All the forces that are working in nature are alive", she says as she reassembles glass bottles, clay fragments, old bones, broken mirrors and the surfaces of streets and walls into new objects, charged with rediscovered mystery and beauty. "To Sari Dienes, nothing is so humble it cannot be made into art."
—Carla Sanders, WOMANART
Although acknowledging her debt to the many 20th century path breakers, Dienes "infuses each stage of her work with decisive originality" (J. Von Baron) and her final, startling resolutions "imitate no man's style and no forms in nature"
—Elise Grilli, JAPAN TIMES
Dienes' commitment to individual expression has invigorated many other artists, including a number of today's art world luminaries. Avant-garde artists of the 70's are just now "discovering" some of the materials and effects which have been part of her experimentation for over 30 years.
Yet, even for those who have followed her development with fascination, it is difficult to realize the tremendous variety of her creative output, which has yet to be presented in a major retrospective.
Here are pieces that may be centered and focused, like her tiny, fragment-filled box collages … or endless, like her long, poetic journey of a painting, "Sixty-six" which no eye, not even the artist's, has seen at once. Here are glowing, musical bottle sculptures and snow paintings which melt slowly and color the earth. These are forms which are not easily made into commodities, but which reflect Dienes' search for evocative images on a deeper, more universal level than most modern art dares to admit. Whatever media she is transforming, be it wood, mylar, snakeskin, leather or light, "the design remains groping, breathing, yet always imbued with a controlling taste and artistry that prevents the sort of blind eruption which often passes for experimentation.
—Elise Grilli, JAPAN TIMES
To converse with Sari Dienes is to hear her discuss laser technology, oriental poetry, or her own inventive health food recipes with equal enthusiasm. Born in Hungary at the turn of the century, Dienes spent her youth studying dance and philosophy in Vienna and Paris. After her marriage to mathematician, poet and philosopher Paul Dienes, she began to study art in Paris in the 20's, first with Leger and L'hote, and then at the famous Ozenfant Academy. Eventually, she became acting director of the school in London where she hired Henry Moore. But as Ozenfant himself would marvel later, Sari had the courage to leave this structured training far behind in her free exploration of new forms.
On a visit to New York in 1939, Dienes was prevented from returning to London by the outbreak of World WarII. She began to teach and work in New York, quickly achieving that rarest of things a generation ago—a one-woman-show, at the New School in 1942. An invitation to work at Hayter's Atelier 17 followed, where she was to make an outstanding contribution to innovative printmaking. In the early 1950's, Dienes invented a method of rubbing with colored inks and rollers to preserve New England gravestone designs which was to bring her international fame. After an article in LIFE magazine, she was hired to make rubbings of petroglyphs, ancient Indian carvings left by prehistoric man, in the American Northwest. She immediately transferred this documentary process to more conceptual works and began to produce extraordinarily sensitive "pictures" lifted from the textures of walls, city streets, organic and industrial discards, and even human faces—carrying the art of frottage to hitherto undreamed-of heights. These highly original methods made Sari Dienes one of the central figures of 50's avant-garde, and the Betty Parsons gallery gave her four solo shows during this period.
After her journey to Japan in 1957, Zen Buddhism heightened Dienes' awareness of the significance of found objects. "Honoring everything", she began to democratize art. Experimenting with a variety of new forms such as clay collages, assemblages and environmental sculpture, she was able to imbue the most familiar things with a wry Zen humor and poetic suggestion.
Judith Von Baron describes Dienes' ability to give everyday objects a primitive simplicity: "A column of coffee filters is given totem-like dignity, ceramic kiln temperature cones are used like animal teeth, charred wood objects create an atmosphere of hidden, vaguely menacing terrain."
In more recent years, Dienes has continued to defy classification, constructing a full-scale "surrounding" in the 60's … creating two monumental silkscreen panels in the New York State Legislative Building, and becoming one of the first artists to incorporate sound and light into her complex assemblages. From "pine cone apparitions" to talking sculpture, her work appears in outdoor exhibits and avant-garde festivals, in shows of unusual themes in many New York galleries, as well as in group shows at the Whitney, the Brooklyn and Bronx Museums. and the Museum of Modern Art.
A member of A.I.R., the first woman's co-operative in Soho, as well as an early member of Women in the Arts, she received an International Women's Year Award in 1976, and has been the subject of a highly praised movie, "Hats, Bottles and Bones" by a woman artist filmmaker, Martha Edelheit.
Today, in her sculpture-filled studio/home in the woods of Stony Point, New York, Dienes is more adventurous than ever with new materials and ideas. Her huge, witty portrait silhouettes have been commissioned by familiar and famous friends. Her "Bone Fall", a magic curtain of natural history, was a highlight of the recent A.I.R. retrospective. Recently her work with color Xerox has endowed that 70's machine with the power to generate exquisite and inscrutable images.
As Elise Grille said in the JAPAN TIMES, "We are obviously in the presence of a dedicated artist, a person who has placed past training and knowledge at the service of a search for newly expressive forms that speak for a newly forming world."
To Sari Dienes, nothing is so humble it cannot be made into art