Catherine Catanzaro Koenig

Catherine Catanzaro Koenig (1921-2004) was born Caterina Catanzaro in 1921 and grew up on the West side of Buffalo, NY. She graduated from Lafayette High School Buffalo in 1939. She exhibited a talent for drawing and painting early on and attended Albright Art School, where she graduated with an Associate’s Degree in 1942.

Her professional career as an artist began in the 1940s when she started to exhibit her work. From 1946-1956 she taught drawing and painting at the Art Institute of Buffalo. She married James R. Koenig in 1947. During the fifties she worked as an illustrator and graphic designer for several WNY area department stores and ad agencies. She was also actively working on portraiture throughout her career.

Her art work evolved from American realism in the forties and fifties to nature-based abstraction in the 1960s. In the seventies she developed her signature style and subject matter: a blend of realism integrating surrealist combinations of still life objects and figures. Her primary medium was egg tempera, an early Renaissance painting technique which is quite rare in contemporary art. Her refined paintings and drawings have been exhibited in many sites locally and nationally including: Butler Institute of Art in Ohio, Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester, NY, Oklahoma Art Center, Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Texas, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in Philadelphia, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY as well as private galleries in Washington DC, London, New York City and Toronto. Her work is part of many public and private collections including University of Buffalo Foundation, Ball State University in Indiana, Burchfield Art Center, Buffalo and the Library of Congress.

Teaching was another important aspect of her artistic career. She taught drawing at the University at Buffalo from 1961- 1979. She also taught at Niagara Community College and ran classes out of her studio.

In 2003 she had concurrent retrospective exhibitions at the University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center. She also received a Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant.

Mark Strong, Catherine Catanzaro Koenig, http://www.meibohmfinearts.com/artists.aspx?ID=573, (Accessed 12/30/2011)