Sinks are part of mundane life where we wash our dirty dishes and do our daily ablutions. In medieval iconography the lavabo was a symbol of purity, and appeared in the backgrounds of numerous Annunciations. Modern and contemporary artists have used sinks to represent our quotidian existence, and some traces of activity: the slop sink in a janitor's closet, contemplating the water issuing from the tap, washing food as a first step in preparations for a meal, doing hand laundry. Many contemporary artists have focused their attention on the sink, including Lucian Freud, Alice Neel, Antonio Lopez Garcia and Catherine Murphy. They are at once gritty and poetic meditations on our temporal existence. The "Kitchen Sink School" was the name of a small group of London-based painters in the 1950s, led by John Bratby. His kind of working-class, deliberately vulgar realism corresponded to Britain's post-war austerity. What subject could better epitomize the mundane than an ordinary sink? Robert Bunkin is a painter, curator, art historian and educator, with a BS from CUNY and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has taught art history and studio art in several NYC art schools, universities, colleges and museums.
New York City, NY; NYC