Amrita Sher-Gil and the Birth of Indian Modernism

Home , Mother India

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 16 NO. 5 New York GALLERY&STUDIO Mother India: Amrita Sher-Gil and the Birth of Indian Modernism

Nalini Malani, Old Arguments on Indigenism, 1989, oil and acrylic on canvas. Peabody Essex Museum, gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection. © Nalini Malani. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, photograph by Walter Silver.

Discovering the glamorous bicultural bisexual woman artist whose merger of European and South Asian aesthetics and Bollywood epic life story inﬂuenced postcolonial masters F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, and Bhupen Khakhar. Pg. 16 530 West 25th Street, New York Tel: 212-226-4151 www.Agora-Gallery.com [email protected]

July 29 - August 19, 2014 Reception: Thursday July 31, 2014 6-8 pm

August 22 - September 11, 2014 Reception: Thursday August 28, 2014 6-8 pm Lest We Forget: Pierre Leclerc / a Solo Exhibition Agora Gallery Suite 203

(from top to bottom) Alix Pierre Thirsty Flamingos Oil on Canvas 24” x 30” Mario Roncaccia II Sogno Oil 35.5” x 55” Pierre Leclerc Acrobats Acrylic on Canvas 40” x 30”

GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 G&S Highlights

Dorothy A. Culpepper, pg. 18

Gene Pompa, pg. 2

Pierre Leclerc, pg. 11

Catherine Garceran, pg. 14

Peter Watson, pg. 13 Takashi Kasai, pg. 3

Subscribe to GALLERY&STUDIO GALLERY&STUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription PUBLISHED BY $47 International $5 Back Issues ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2014 Mail check or Money Order to: ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDw GALLERY&STUDIO 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen City CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip Gene Pompa: the Palpable Texture of Nature he Italian artist, Gene Pompa occurs in nature, Tcould almost be termed an “anti- but is rarely defined Impressionist,” because while the so precisely in Impressionists sought to capture the effect painting, in a of light on landscape, Pompa endeavors to manner which evoke landscape’s actual substance. Which is might even have to say: Pompa literally constructs his relief-like pleased a stickler pictures in considerable detail with tactile like Mondrian. Yet daubs of thickly built-up oil pigment, evoking it is atmospherically the very texture of the bark on the trunks and open and airy as individual branches of the trees in his glowing well, with the clear nature scenes with thick, yet precise neo- blue of the sky pointillistic strokes apparently applied with showing horizontal a fine-pointed brush (although according wisps of cloud to an artist statement, he also employs a as slender as jet spatula). Each leaf, each blade of grass on the trails, and the lawns below is delineated as a discrete entity leaf-laden branches in a painstakingly detailed neo-pointillist on the two lushly technique akin to that of Seurat, lending each blooming trees “Specchi d’autunno” of his compositions an almost hologramatic appearing to sway that offshoot of the American Hudson River materiality. Indeed, like Seurat, Pompa lazily in a soft summer breeze. School of painters known as Luminism. In obviously endeavors to impose a sense of Somewhat more complex is “Specchi Pompa’s version, however, another aspect of abstract in the austere composition of the oil d’autunno,” in which several more trees the painting’s appeal is the unique textural on canvas he calls “Primavera.” speckled with a chromatically variegated contrast he achieves between the thin, almost Here, two verdantly blooming trees are spectrum of autumnal leaves stand as straight translucent glazes of diluted oil paint which seen in an expansive sun-splashed meadow, as sentries in a leaf-strewn meadow, their he employs to evoke the smooth, ethereal set against a clear blue sky, their slender trunks mirrored here and there in puddles of Continued on page 11 trunks supplying vertical contrasts to the flat rain water on the grass below. A particularly lay of the grass-covered land, bordered by lovely feature of this canvas is the sky, which thin areas of dirt road near the bottom of glows through an intricate network of Gene Pompa can be seen in the year-round the composition. The painting possesses an graceful tree branches, tinged with tints of salon at Montserrat Contemporary Art, underlying sense of a geometry that often pale, purplish pink in a manner reminiscent of 547 West 27th Street. Montserratgallery.com Several Artists Reveal Their Inner Joys & Demons lthough Silvia Soares Boyer is best known the following hand-scripted verse in the “Reflection of Sea Anemone.” As Afor her mystical hard-edged abstractions, composition, “Divine Particle:” “Dot so coloristically rich and linearly intricate as a in the group exhibition called “Dreams smaller / than the eye / can see / the light Mughal miniature, its composition conjured & Reflections 2014,” co-curated with her of / time passed/ through the / nothing up a semiabstract anthropomorphic plant husband Daniel C. Boyer for the West Side ‘round / the point / of never / as the / ever form wiggling in a luminous aqueous Arts Coalition, she shows an autoportrait: constant / equal of / an only / in the holy / environment. “Silvia –– the Gothic Myself.” Created in of the / souling / of the/ one.” Bringing us back down to earth, acrylic and silver pen on paper, showing the The titles of Daniel C. Boyer, who has Marguerite Borchardt was represented black-haired, black-eyed, black-lipsticked been known at times to paint with gouache by a grouping of intimate landscapes and artist done up in one of her trademark black diluted with Coca-Cola, comprise Dada seascapes in oils on canvas, such as “Provence outfits (complete with above-the-elbow-black poems in themselves, as in the work that Vineyard” and “Surf –– Port Cros.” The gloves and esoteric symbol jewelry), it cast its accompanies his slightly oval-shaped tondo, former, combines stucco structures, ruddy own bewitching spell. “The Forest Wherein the Monster was earth, and breeze-blown trees, the latter By contrast, Marie Robson showed an Brought to Death Before the Martyr who juxtaposes craggy brown rocks and crashing, ethereal watercolor of a phantom-like female was Reminded by the Diagonal Smell of the white-foam-crested blue water. Both bring face afloat in a cloud of delicately mottled Two or Three Years he was Married to the a rugged American vision akin to that of rainbow hues. Even with its specific title Sciatic It Girl Brought by the Custom Wind Marsden Hartley to the French countryside. “Rima,” much in keeping with the show’s Beyond the Spoon-Fed Hills and the Heights Arlene Finger also celebrates everyday dreamy theme, Robison’s sensitive little Held by the Anorexic.” Although its title beauty in “Everywhere Leaves,” a still aquarelle suggested a portrait of an imaginary might suggest the plot synopsis for an entire life in charcoal pencil, white chalk, and being. season of “Game of Thrones,” it’s actually a charcoal, depicting two vigorously delineated Indeed, mystical and spiritual subjects slightly oval-shaped tondo lyrical abstraction potted plants. Here, Finger has apparently abounded: Anne Rudder departed from comprised of gaily colored biomorphic forms worked and reworked her monochromatic her familiar figurative style in her work as fanciful and buoyantly free-floating as composition in an elegantly smeared manner, in watercolor, crayon, pen, and pencil anything by Miro. achieving a semiabstract plastic tension “Divine Particle,” in which a fiery abstract Along with “Spiritual Happiness,” a Continued on page 11 shape glowed from a dark field. However, figurative composition of saffron robed Rudder remained true to her Blakean figures strolling through an idyllic forest, WSAC “Dreams & Reflections” June 11 manner of merging visual art and poetry Dammika D. Ranasinghe contributed - 29, 2014, Broadway Mall Community in an illuminating synthesis, incorporating another acrylic on canvas paper entitled Center, 96th St. (center island).

2 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 Takashi Kasai Captures the Windmills of Our Minds ne of the most common mistakes made of the true devotee. If only one could look bottom of the grid is missing, the opening’s Oby contemporary artists enamored of beyond the serene features of the meditating inner depth–– out of which a crystalline oval Buddhist meditation is attempting to imitate statue, with its heavy-lidded eyes and cupidic appears to have rolled like a mystical egg from the brush and ink techniques of the literati little hint of a smile, the artist appears to be a geometric womb –– suggests that the grid artist-poets of ancient China and Japan. telling us, one might see an entire world of is composed of stacked cubes. Yet a slight Perhaps the most obvious examples in the turbulent inner struggle. perceptual shift on the part of the viewer West, although he never acknowledged their In one intricate composition in a perfectly repositions the grid so that its overall effect is influence upon him, was Franz Kline, whose square format, the bust of the Buddha is of a cage, in which the two faces are locked large black and white oils on canvas are often enclosed within a painted frame decorated in stifling but seductive proximity. Indeed, compared to those Asian masters for their with a precise linear grid that enhances the dewy red rose, set against the brilliant apparent spontaneity. Over the years since his both the sculptural and metaphysical blue exterior of the cage at the point in the death it has become known, however, that qualities of the image within, by creating composition where the lips of the two figures Kline carefully sketched his calligraphic forms the optical effect that the squares are almost meet, can only be seen as symbolic in brush and ink on the pages of a phone alternately advancing and receding on the of worldly desire. And while, unlike the avatars of most more formal belief systems, the Buddha did not impose moral restrictions on sexual expression, he did recommend celibacy as one possible path to worldly renunciation and purity of mind. Yet another large canvas in the series appears to depict the attainment of that serene spiritual state at which one From the Eternal Meditation Series apparently book, before blowing them up and tracing picture plane. On the Buddha’s head sits endeavors to arrive through meditation them in oils with a broad house painter’s a tall crown of almost papal elaborateness undisrupted by external reality. The large brush and the help of an opaque projector. adorned with several semitransparent faces, reposeful face of a Buddhist statue with The immortal Basho would have laughed perhaps representing his several previous lowered eyes, seen in three-quarter profile, his head off at the lengths to which this 20th incarnations. All around the figure, sinuous dominates the canvas. Although it is century American abstract expressionist went waves, delineated in the actively decorative obviously composed of solid matter, it is to create the illusion of a gestural spontaneity manner of Hokusai, enter the picture space, semitransparent with silvery, gently swirling which, in Zen ink painting, is a product of reaching almost threatening-looking tentacles circles visible within and around it, suggesting spirit rather than technique. toward the Enlightened One –– as if to the qualities of “Eternal Meditation” as The 21st century Japanese painter “blow his cool,” so to speak. Rendered at they are expressed in the lyrics of that poetic Takashi Kasai, on the other hand, does not large contemporary scale in oil on canvas in Michel Legrand song: “Like a circle in a spiral attempt to create illusions of effortless grace the manner of Buddhist temple paintings in / like a wheel within a wheel / never ending and enlightenment. Rather, he expends colors on silk, rather than in the swift, spare, never beginning/ on an ever spinning reel / considerable effort, in the meticulously monochromatic style of literati ink painting, as the images unwind / in the windmills of painted large-scale acrylic compositions on this picture enshrines the meditating statue your mind...” linen that make up his “Eternal Meditation” as a mythic Superhero of contemplative That Takashi Kasai has given solid painterly series, to evoke the stillness, volumetric inaction. substance to subtle and complex aspects of solidity, stoic expressions, and gleaming Another picture in the series depicts such an ethereal and elusive subject makes bronze or matte sandstone surfaces of the two incongruously matched faces within this, his first solo exhibition in New York, a figures in Buddhist temple statuary. Thus, a blue gridded cube resembling one of most auspicious debut. –– Ed McCormack through his own painstaking work process, M.C. Escher’s spatially ambiguous optical Kasai projects the rigorous effort (as opposed conundrums: that of a male Buddhist Takashi Kasai, recently seen at to the “instant karma” or easy Nirvana temple sculpture and that of a gold-ringleted Caelum Gallery, 526 West 26th St., imagined by spiritual faddists, especially in the Western beauty, resembling one of Botticelli’s Caelumgallery.com West)–– that meditation actually demands classical goddesses. Since one square at the

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 3 AWS’ 147th Exhibition: A World of Possibilities hat watercolor is a medium with wide Abstract Expressionism, combining its formal armrests. Teong Meow Chuah’s “Family’s Tpublic appeal was made immediately vocabulary with touches of realism to create Story, Golden Ferris Wheel,” to which the evident by the number of people in the a vital synthesis of diverse styles. The natural old Chinese adage, “a picture is worth a galleries of the venerable Salmagundi Club on freshness and luminosity of watercolor makes thousand words” seems to apply. For while Lower Fifth Avenue this past Good Friday. it a wonderful medium for capturing subtle its title is obscure, this portrait of a wiry “They’ve been coming by the busload qualities of light, as seen in Stephen Quiller’s middle-aged Asian man, puffing a cigarette as ever since the show opened,” said John Patt, snowy landscape enlivened by rainbow auras, he rests on a wooden box in what appears to the Executive Director of the American “Transparency of Shadows,” as well as in be a small impoverished village, with the legs Watercolor Society, who happened to Leslie Frontz’s “Chinese Red,” a briskly of his trousers rolled up to catch the night be on hand that day to greet visitors to executed bird’s eye-view of pedestrians breeze on his bare shins, clearly bespeaks a the organization’s 147th International casting their shadows on the sunlit pavement life of struggle and hard work. Then there is Exhibition. outside the brilliant red awning of a Chinese “Knowing Only Her Truth,” an insightful It was easy to see why, given that the Restaurant. character study by Carol McSweeney, works on view were as various as the visitors Also quite memorable was “Departure,” in which a woman in a floral print dress themselves, offering something for every a wide- angle view of an airport with various and bouncy hairdo projects an attitude of taste. vehicles, air craft, and tiny figures seen on self-regard and certainty with the tilt of her One of our particular favorites was rain-slick runway, evoked predominantly in head and her sidewise glance. Although this “Political Differences # 4,” by Edwin subtle silvery-gray hues by Joseph Zbukvic. portrait is cutoff at the bust, the position Shuttleworth, an artist whose work almost “Daily News,” by Gregory S. Bruno, put a of the subject’s shoulders and upper arms always contains a dramatic element of new slant of post-Pop imagery with precisely suggests that her hands rest on her hips, a narrative. Here, in a setting resembling a rendered overlapping newspaper front pages. posture that enhances the sense of a person small ramshackle mill town, under a billboard Bruno’s treatment of photographs and unwilling to meet anyone halfway.

Edwin Shuttleworth Joseph Zbukvic Monika Pate

Maria Greenfield Jack Johnson Charles Rouse Excellent examples of landscape and that says “Be Responsible VOTE today,” cityscape demonstrated how different moods out behind the low-lying building housing headlines is fragmented to create a dynamic can be created by virtue of varying watercolor an establishment called “Pot Belly’s Pub,” abstract composition, suggesting a trompe- techniques. Qian Gao’s “A Small Street several men are voting with their fists, as l’oeil collage –– albeit hand-painted in precise to Montmarte,” for example, adopts the passersby view the action from across the detail. spare, swift technique of traditional Chinese street, while one woman watches from the Also combining an element of Pop with watercolor to the fuller palette of Western window of a nearby tenement. It’s a real a hint of irony Jack Johnson’s portrait “The aquarelle to capture a French street scene donnybrook; but the violence is softened by Patriot,” sets a meticulous realist portrait of a with utmost economy and grace. By contrast, Shuttleworth’s ability to impart charm to his grim-faced mature man sporting a Western- a photorealist style is employed by Charles scenes with quaintly stylized architectural and style stetson against a backdrop of the stars Rouse in “Gotta Love It,” in which a jumble figurative forms and cheery colors resembling and stripes. of yellow cabs, pedestrians crossing a busy those in the cityscapes of the great Chinese- Other fine portraits include: “Emily,” by Manhattan thoroughfare, and the colorful American watercolorist Dong Kingman. Lynne Magee, a study of a young woman umbrellas of street venders evoke the sharp Another painting that caught our eyes with strawberry blonde hair and fine features, contrasts of a sunny summer day in midtown among the many works on view was “A wearing a pale green turtleneck sweater that Manhattan. A contrastingly emblematic Cubist Lunch,” in which George James complements her porcelain complexion, as technique, featuring boldly simplified forms does for Cubism what Larry Rivers did for she poses seated in a wood chair with curved and flat color areas, is used by Susan Webb

4 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 Tracery”; Chung- Wei Chien’s atmospherically moody sky hanging over houses and telephone poles in “Small Town, Osaka”; and Sy Ellens’ “High View,” verdant tree tops and a curving blue stream are viewed as though from a helicopter hovering high above the terrain. Still life, another favorite subject, Gregory S. Bruno also made several superb appearances, ranging from Janine Gallizia’s delicately toned, dreamy vision of a bouquet of pink roses in a pale blue Teong Meow Chuah vase, “Nostalgia”; to “Bits & Bridles,” a meticulously rendered composition by Bill Baffa of equestrian accessories hanging on the wooden wall of a tack-room; to “Magnolias with Samovar,” a darkly elegant composition by Laurin McCracken Chung-Wei Chien juxtaposing soft Tregay to depict ofﬁce workers sitting on white petals and gleaming brass; to Monika steps, consuming fast food and checking their Pate’s study of old, rusted metal machine cell phones during their lunch hour. surfaces, “Abandoned”; to “All-Star Landscape subjects were also abundant Huddle,” a pair of well-worn sneakers, here: Jerry Smith’s vigorous vision of autumn delineated with all the care and character of a foliage and weathered rustic structures in portrait by Maria Greenﬁeld. “Grace Period”; Bob Noreika’s composition Some of the compositions cited in this built on snow-laden tree-limbs, “Winter review won prizes, while others did not (awards, after all, are based on personal taste, and jurors, like the rest of us, have their own Janine Gallizia prejudices and preferences). However, all of the works in the show –– just a small fraction of which could be discussed in this space -– demonstrated the versatility of what former AWS President Mario Cooper referred to as

Bill Baffa “the long and continuing tradition of the art of watercolor painting”. –– Byron Coleman Recently seen at The Salmagundi Club, 47 Fifth Ave at 12th Street. americanwatercolorsociety.org Susan Webb Tregay Bob Noreika

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 5 Fracchia, Krakauer, Sossi, and Sebastian: Highlighting Four

aving had the pleasure of being and another Hintroduced to the work of the series called “Sea, accomplished California realist Barbara Snow, and Sky,” Fracchia in her solo exhibition “Fashion that resulted Statements” at Montserrat Contemporary from crossing the Art Gallery last year, we eagerly anticipated English Channel her appearance as one of the four artist’s at night during a featured in the salon show in the same snow storm. Chelsea venue. “Of the former Fracchia’s take on fashionistas and experience the fashion victims was satirical, skewering their artist says, “There pretensions with impressive wit and painterly is nothing like skill. Indeed, it was the latter qualities that flying! It takes made the series something more substantial one above the than an exercise in standup-at-the easel earth, sometimes comedy. For above all, Fracchia is a painter’s above the clouds, painter, possessed of the skill to carry off and often among complex compositions, such as “Met Opera,” the clouds.” And the show stopper in the present exhibition. of the latter, she Although in the tradition of Edward says, “Several Hopper’s classic canvas focusing on a lone other passengers female usherette standing pensively at the and I stood on back of a rather shabby old fashioned movie the back of the theater, Fracchia’s painting captures the more ferry and enjoyed festive atmosphere of a theatrical evening in a the storm. The more elegant milieu. wind whipped in The pièce de résistance of the picture is the circles, picking long, red-carpeted Grand Stairway, which Barbara Fracchia, “Met Opera” up the water, swoops dynamically into the right side of combining it with the composition. The serpentine curve of fanciful side of her aesthetic sensibility. The the heavy snow, and the sky. The lights on the its white marble balustrade and gleaming real blockbuster this time out, however, is ferry added the dimension of rainbow colors.” brass bannisters and railings follows the small her opera tour de force of an opera house Both compositions are at once realistic figures of the opera goers descending the panorama. and fantastic near abstractions, filled with the steps into the red carpeted lobby, illuminated * * * tumultuous energy of nature unleashed. In by the opera house’s distinctive crystal Along with being a painter and marked contrast, Dorothy Krakauer’s works chandeliers, glowing like phosphorescent photographer best known for nature in the present salon exhibition, “Leaves in white floral bouquets. subjects, Dorothy Krakauer, who was born Central Park,” numbers one and two, and Here, where a couple stands chatting in on the Indian Nations Reservations in “Grape Leaves,” numbers one and two, are a corridor between two levels, as an elderly Columbia Falls, Montana, has been active studies in stillness, emblematic and lyrical. gentleman nearby makes his cautious way in international relations. She was twice down a few low steps, the white marble curve honored by Emperor Hirohito of Japan for that animates the entire composition takes a her work in the international community sudden U-turn above some shadowy figures while living in Tokyo from 1965 to 1968. milling around like Dante’s subterranean “I grew up in the mountains, and the inner souls in the murkier light of the lower lobby, peace I carry with me was born there,” she to call attention to the organic architectural says of “I Dream of Mountains,” a painting contours of the two upper tiers, where most inspired by taking the tram to the top of of the crowd is gathered at intermission time. Mount Victoria and seeing the mountains in It is a painting that makes one think of the bay during her sojourn in Japan. Degas or Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec for During the 1970s, she supervised the artist’s ability to capture the zeigeist of renovation of the sanctuary of the 101-year her time, just as they captured that of La old Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist and Belle Époque and the Impressionist period. restoration of murals and walls of the 17th For here, as in her fashion series, Fracchia century Church of St. Polycarp in Izmir, has an ability to incorporate a great deal of Turkey. While in residence there, she received detail without bogging down in fussiness a NATO Award for Women for her work or impeding the fluency of her brushwork. in Turkey, and created a portrait of Saint Each figure suggests an individual posture Francis of Assisi for the sanctuary of St. John and attitude, even when features are not the Evangelist that was declared a national clearly delineated, lest their inclusion distract treasure by the Turkish government. from the cohesiveness of the composition as Although Dorothy Krakauer has produced a whole. many memorable impressions of nature over Also included in the salon is a charming the years, some of her most memorable are a undersea scene by Fracchia titled “Plight series of oils inspired by learning to fly a single of the Dumb Bass,” revealing a more engine plane titled, “Among the Clouds,” Dorothy Krakauer “Leaves of Central Park II”

6 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 Diverse Talents in a Lively Chelsea Salon Show

at the bottom, the jacket. The musician’s hand and fingers on central image of a lake the keys of the sax are drawn in some detail, on which simplified yet remain linear, without color, while the figures row a small lower part of his face, toward the top of the boat is surrounded by composition, is only faintly indicated with a the shaded patterns of few sketchy strokes. leaves and the trunks The contrasting treatment of the man of trees, their shapes and the horn –– a kind of “fading in and rhyming visually with out” fragmentation –– is somewhat akin to those of the puffy the style of Larry Rivers (who was, in fact, a clouds above the water. jazz musician before he became a painter), Another pencil perhaps suggests that the art itself is more drawing is even more important, in the overall schemes of things, “worked up,” depicting than the artist who creates it. a quaint country path Chelo Sebastian also applies a similar bordered by trees, their technique to landscape compositions, trunks shaded with lines which, along with still life subjects, comprise and crosshatching, their a considerable part of her oeuvre. Her leaves lushly delineated landscapes and marinescapes, such as “End as they shelter a cozy of Summer II,” and “Winter Light,” both in Renato Emilio Sossi “Shoreline” little house almost watercolor and mixed media, employ a kind The paintings one has seen by Brazilian- hidden amid the foliage. Here again, Renato of cubist-inflected planar fracturing akin to born Renato Emilio Sossi were elegantly Emilio Sossi demonstrates his ability to make that used by the great American watercolorist stylized equestrian scenes, pictures of people pencil drawing a medium for fully realized John Marin in his Maine and New Mexico at their leisure in pastoral park settings, and graphic statements. landscapes. In Sebastian’s compositions, opulently patterned room interiors in subtly * * * however, collage also comes into play adding harmonized hues that peaked one’s interest The fourth artist, Chelo Sebastian, born a rugged textural element to her vigorous by coherently combining qualities of artistic in Spain and a resident of Canada since compositions. ancestors as diverse as Matisse, Raoul Dufy, 1969, works in mixed media. Often she She employs torn paper collage especially and Constantin Guys, the 19th century combines collage with watercolor, ink, effective in still life compositions such as French draftsman known for his images of pastel, and sometimes includes wax to create one called “Say it with Flowers II.” Here, fashionable society. a distinctive “resist” technique to some it appears that she sacrificed other still lifes Sossi’s figures are sleek, svelte slivers of of her compositions. One featured in the in watercolor to create a collage dominated humanity. Colors are at once vibrant and present salon exhibition at Montserrat is “I by a brown earthenware vase filled with subdued. Although a sense of vast open Wished on the Moon, II,” a semiabstract boldly painted red flowers. The overlapping spaces is suggested in his compositions, rendering of a jazz saxophonist. The most sheets of thick watercolor, with the paint forms hug the two-dimensional picture plain prominent element of the composition is the interrupted by their roughly torn edges, in the modernist manner, creating a taut gleaming gold instrument itself, its keys and add a tactile quality to the picture, while the visual tension between figure-to-ground mouthpiece delineated in detail in watercolor, fragmentation of the images, along with relationships. Public pathways are bordered against a shimmering expanse of blue and Chelo Sebastian’s aquarelle freewheeling by neat patches of lawn in subtle green hues. purple, painted in subtly modulated “wet- technique, with the resulting occasional Pale purple towers climb skyward above the in-to wet” technique, indicating his silky suit “action painting” drips add up to a tiny figures of jockeys on horseback poised in dynamically articulated subject. the grassy paddock at a racetrack. Indeed, the eclectic quality of this salon In this salon exhibition, however, Sossi exhibition makes it a stimulating experience presents a more intimate view of his working for those interested in sampling the various process by showing only drawings. emerging tendencies in the postmodern In the notes hand-printed in lines as era. For while some complain that there is precise as those in his drawings, which he no dominant movement to look to at the was kind enough to provide us with before onset of the 21st century, a more positive the exhibition, the mental picture of a way of looking at it is to speculate that we Baudelairean flaneur with a pencil and a have possibly reached a post-movement sketchbook, comes across when the artist point in history at which artists can now explains, “In my sketchbook I draw moments avail themselves of an unprecedented level of and places that I go: coffee bars, taverns, freedom to follow their own instincts rather restaurants, gardens, horse tracks, lakes, street than jumping from one stylistic bandwagon scenes, places that I walk, places that I live. to another. And who can say that this I sit on a bench or stand drawing nature. I aesthetic freedom of choice may not result in draw what I see and sometimes what I don’t some of the most interesting and innovative see. Spontaneously I let it flow.” art to come along in quite some time? Sossi’s drawings are in pencil, and while –– Marie Pagano they sometimes serve as preliminary sketches for his paintings, they are often complete Works by these artists can be viewed and finished enough to stand on their in the year-round salon at Montserrat own as independent works of art. In one Contemporary Art, 547 West 27th Street, drawing with the title “Shoreline” printed Chelo Sebastian “I Wished On the Moon II” MontserratGallery.com

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 7 Five Emerging Talents Light Up WCSU MFA Thesis Show he figure paintings of Andrew Dylan her previous training nonetheless –– lends TCampbell combine a somewhat her work an organic cohesiveness often deceptive snapshot immediacy with a taut lacking in much work loosely categorized formal underpinning that he partially under the hardly satisfactory heading of obscures by virtue of his vertiginously so-called “scatter art.” offbeat sense of composition. Often his paintings are based on memories of growing up on Long Island and center on “a very familiar setting, the beach.” Unlike the 1940s social realist Reginald Marsh, who self-consciously sought to lend the scantily clad, for all intents and purposes, naked, and idealized, bodies of the bathers in his Coney Island beach scenes an eternal quality, “like the great compositions of Michelangelo and Rubins,” Campbell strives for a more ostensibly naturalistic quality. Still, the casual, fleeting gesture of the slender blond girl in the black bikini in the foreground of the large acrylic on canvas that the artist calls “The Idea of Order” (apparently reaching her arm up Andrew Dylan Campbell to adjust her hair) freezes her in time Exhibition. like a comely classical statue. Yet none Another is the sculptor Katie M. of the other figures in the composition Bassett, whose mixed media piece in –– the preoccupied young man in blue brown kraft paper and india ink “sisters trunks, with whom this Long Island venus and memories” spills off the gallery wall practically collides, as he walks along with and down onto the floor with a funky, Katie M. Bassett his head down; the possibly homeless ragged elegance reflecting the artist’s man stiflingly overdressed in a lumpy blue statement: “All of my work expresses the Like a previous generation of older hoodie, baggy blue slacks, and rain ducks, need to rebuilt what has been altered by artists that included Eva Hesse, Robert carrying what appears to be a plastic bag breaking my own preconceived rules of Morris, and Richard Serra, who sought of empty bottles and cans; the less comely art, expression and materials. I utilize to stress the mutability of art through a young woman with the pot-belly spilling a large range of domestic materials to seemingly random use of materials, Bassett over the bottom of her own bikini –– represent fragments of my existence as an creates evocative three-dimensional appears aware of this moment of grace in artist and a woman.” installations that appear, through her their midst. Bassett’s training in traditional subtly calculated juxtapositions of Campbell is one of five emerging artists sculpture and graphic design has goaded seemingly chaotic elements, to sensitize from the School of Visual & Performing her to rebel against tradition by adopting the viewer to the hidden beauty inherent Arts of Western Connecticut State a nontraditional artistic practice in in everyday detritus of both nature and University making their debut in Chelsea, installation and process-based work. Yet an urban life that we have come to regard as New York City, in this year’s MFA Thesis intuitive aesthetic –– perhaps informed by ordinary and banal.

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, Inc. Uptown Is The New Downtown A Photography Exhibit Curated by Jean Prytyskacz Annual Members’ Exhibition 2014 September 10 – 28, 2014 Opening Reception: Saturday , September 13, 2:30 - 5:30pm May 24–June 6, 2014 Closing Reception: Sunday , September 28, 2:30 - 5:30pm *HS,HNSL࠮4`YUH/HYYPZVU*OHUNHY࠮1+4VYYPZVU° Reception & Awards: 1LHU7Y`[`ZRHJa࠮+HTTPRH9HUHZPUNOL +PT\[O\°9HUHZPUNOL࠮*HYVS`U9L\Z࠮3LU:WLPLY Friday, June 6, 6-8 PM ./:[YH\ZZ࠮1HUPJL>VVK>L[aLS

The Salmagundi Art Club Broadway Mall Community Center 47 Fifth Ave, NYC Broadway@96 St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm Hours: Mon.- Fri. 1-6 pm; Sat.& Sun. 1-5 pm ^ZHJU`'^ZHJU`VYN2131^^^^ZHJU`VYN 8 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 In Bassett’s “sister’s and memories,” painting portraits of people I know, and and mystery behind the fire, steam and however, the title, along with the formal love to see what feelings emerge through rust, I relish the careful crafting that goes suggestion of a standing and a prone the paint or what compositional or stylistic into each piece. I follow a trail of valves, figure in the vertical and horizontal forms elements are influenced by these personal gears, holes, bolts, pipes and rivets to see spilling down the wall to the gallery floor, relationships. In these new, more intimate what these anthropomorphic shapes will also imbues the piece with a metaphysical portraits of family and friends, I am reveal.” emotional evocativeness that transcends its learning about myself and my relationship Another writer referred to Ross’ raw materiality. to the subject.” machine paintings as “portraits” and Like MacIver, André Eamiello is a visual In her small portrait on primed paper, that designation is indeed accurate, since nature poet who employs watercolor on “Katie,” Girard creates a picture of a large sheets of Arches paper, along with young woman with bangs and long natural materials such as dried leaves, brown sun kissed hair standing before which he traces in the manner of stencils a landscape, executed in paler shades and collage materials, as well as applying of pink and yellow than the rest of the to the surface as a collage element to composition, that could resemble a create compositions that achieve an more loosely brushed stage backdrop or exquisite balance between the allusive and painting. Judging from this portrait, like the abstract. Elizabeth Peyton, also from Connecticut At once chromatically dynamic, with and known for her similarly intimate- their vibrant colors and subtle tactility, Eamiello’s paintings also share qualities in common with the “New Naturism” of artists like Gregory Amenoff, whose relationship with natural sources for abstraction harks back to pioneering American modernists such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley. Eamiello’s intricately interwoven surfaces, however, combined with the radiant translucence of his palette, as seen here in “Tide Pool Katie Ross Dream Story Danbury, January 2014,” where a cosmic multitude of tiny, delicate she imbues each picture with its own pink, yellow, and green forms float over particular character and “personality,” as an aqueous blue field like bits of organic seen “# 4, oil on steel,” in which a rugged matter caught up in a whirlpool, suggest machine that this writer, being altogether a marriage of the diverse manners of inconversant with mechanical objects of Charles Burchfield and Jackson Pollock any type, is at a loss to identify. All one harmoniously melded in an energetic can say is that with what appears to be the postmodern synthesis. blade of a chainsaw rising jaggedly out of Miranda Girard, a representational the top of its tubular yellow metal body, painter with a creamy painterly touch barnacled with serious-looking bolts and and a sunlight-infused color sense, states, Miranda Girard nuts, it’s a formidable looking “monster,” “Presently, I have been focusing on to borrow the painter’s own word. scale likenesses of rock stars and other While some might describe Katie Ross’ glamorous young subjects, Girard, paintings as a new breed of Precisionism recently named Connecticut’s Artist of in the tradition of Charles Sheer, its the Year, has the ability to paint pretty, weathered warts-rust-and-all realism and unblemished people without verging on portrait-like individuality appear more banality. Rather, Girard presents us with akin to the trompe l’oeil still lifes (many a picture of a serious, thoughtful looking including timeworn tools) of Walter young person, in which the caressed Murch. combination of restraint and vigor in the Each of the artists in this Master paint surface is every bit as appealing as of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition attest the portrait subject herself. to Western Connecticut State’s well Katie Ross paints in oil on steel, a deserved reputation as one of those rare medium that suits her subject matter in contemporary art schools that consistently more ways than one, since her current graduates artists well versed in genuine body of work depicts antique machines studio skills, rather than mere theory. and tools. –– Ed McCormack “From monolithic industrial monsters such as power hammers, steam locomotives and furnaces to gas torches and drill bits, they represent America’s Western Connecticut State University rich industrial heritage. . .,” Ross says. Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition “Charmed by the sensuousness and 2014, Blue Mountain Gallery, 530 West André Eamiello functionality, and drawn to the darkness 25th St. June 17 - July 5, 2014 JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 9 Symbols, Sign Language & Shadow Shows in Loho ix artists seen recently at Artifact on Orchard mind the floating biomorphic forms of Miro, William Allshouse, a postmodern ancestor of the SStreet attested through their stylistic diversity Calder’s mobiles, kites, and balsa wood model Fauves with a color sense that lends new, electric that the Lower East Side is still a melting pot, airplanes and rainbow feathers of tropical birds in life to the landscape genre. Allshouse’s acrylics albeit of a different kind than it was at the turn of flight. Fresh and original, Aquilino’s pieces offer on canvas such as “Yellow Trees” fairly vibrate the last century. These days artists mix, revise, and a pallet-cleansing antidote to the heavy hangover with a chromatic richness that endeavors to do in some cases, parody historical sources by virtue of overdone Angst Art. nothing short of upstaging nature with unlikely of their own knowingly postmodern sensibilities. Imagine the Radio City Rockettes performing unions of violet pink and neon orange that create When B-movie Western posses spoke of a one of their centipede choreographic a sumptuous optical feast. Another coloristic “necktie party” they meant stringing some cattle extravaganzas as naked as the day they were epiphany, titled “Western Skies,” with its rustler or other outlaw up to the nearest tree. But born; or Mapplethorpe’s nude men double- shapely, purple-shaded clouds, recalls Nolde and today that term could be applied to the mixed exposed to create mandala-like configurations. Vlaminck for its coloristic intrepidness, even while media paintings of Madrid artist Antonio Calleja. Well-known glamour and art photographer Allshouse’s rugged paint-handling hints at more Pop artist Jim Dine may have been the first German Velasquez makes every female a Venus, of an affinity with the craggy Yankee abstractions to incorporate a man’s tie into a mixed media every male an Adonis in images printed on of Clyfford Still. composition. But Calleja is the first to make multi-layered Plexiglas that are at once as ethereal Then there is William Baran-Mickle whose them such recurring symbols in his otherwise as mounted butterflies and as sensually exquisite figurative wall reliefs, created with brass, copper, abstract paintings that we suddenly realize what as the tiny, yet eerily lifelike, wax figures of nude and sterling silver, often emphasize the expressive they are: business accessories that serve as phallic girls that the late sculptor and Angelica Huston qualities of human hands, begetting a variety symbols, at once formal and ridiculous! In spouse Robert Graham exhibited in Plexiglas of signs and symbols. In the piece called “Bang other words, the sartorial equivalent of a macho boxes in the 1960s. Like Andy Warhol before Bang,” for example, four chubby, childlike hands “pissing match”! him, German Velasquez gingerly transcends all create a shadow show on a wall, the sculptural To give Calleja his due in strictly aesthetic imaginary barriers between commercial and fine palpability of the former contrasting dramatically terms, however, one should also say that he is art in his pursuit of unabashed beauty. with the illusory quality of the latter. While three a painterly talent as inventive as Jean-Michel Quite an opposite approach to photographic hands create silhouettes of animal heads, the Basquiat for his ability to fill even his most subject matter comes across in the digital prints thumb and pointing forefinger of the fourth casts abstract canvases with a host of signs, numerals, and video installations of Jenny-Marie Johnsen, the shadow of a gun taking aim at them. Never symbols, letters, word fragments, gestural which veer between the austere and the sublime. before have the innocently playful origins of flourishes, and varied mark-making devices that Sky, land, and the Arctic sea tilt and change violent aggression been so succinctly symbolized. lend them a funky energy and lively sense of places vertiginously in Johnsen’s rollercoastering In another relief by Baran-Mickle, an adult visual incident. visionary installation “Abyssal Plain.” By contrast, hand clutches a purple heart and a holy medal. It The intricate color marker drawings and in Johnsen’s “Arctic Antarctic Columnar” series, is juxtaposed with a child’s hand gently cradling buoyant painted foamboard sculptures of developed in collaboration with scientists at the a tiny insect, and a khaki-colored toy soldier, and another Spanish import, Carlos Aquilino, Norwegian Polar Institute, irregularly shaped set against the back drop of a large target. assimilate a variety of eclectic sources. The shards sections of core ice, photographed in Human hands, heads, and torsos interact squirmy forms in his drawings, for example, run polarized light, yield an unearthly spectrum with plant forms, insects, and objects to suggest a broad gamut from pre-Columbian designs to of luminous gemlike hues. And in yet another more enigmatic meanings in other compositions Munch’s skeletal screaming face to Dubuffet’s installation, consisting of a video and a by Baran-Mickle, who has evolved a deeply jigsaw ‘hourloups.” Yet together they all add up photo series on several panels, that Johnsen suggestive sign language all his own. to a singular style, in which urban buildings with calls “Eclipse Galaxy Color,” overlapping –– Maurice Taplinger many windows bend like geometrically patterned vibrantly colored orbs of abstract origin pose a serpents to wrap around bug-eyed, gape- contemporary counterpart to the “Orphism” of Artists reviewed were recently seen mouthed faces and zany Plastic Man humanoid early modernists such as Robert Delaunay and at Artifact, 84 Orchard Street, figures. Same goes for Aquilino’s lighter-than-air Frantisek Kupka. btw Broome and Grand 3-D foamboard pieces: Suspended on invisible A spectrum greatly heightened from reality Artifactnyc.net strings from the gallery’s ceiling, they call to also figures prominently in the work of painter

Western Connecticut State University Master of Fine Arts in Painting & Illustration

Gallery show to highlight five artists The Art of M Katie M. Bassett Miranda Girard F Andrew Dylan Campbell Katie Ross A André Eamiello GAIL COMES Show dates: June 17 – July 5 Opening Reception: Thursday, June 19, 5 – 8 p.m. through June 8, 2014 Blue Mountain Gallery 530 W. 25th St., 4th floor Opening reception: Saturday, May New York, NY 10001 31, 2:30 - 5:30pm Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. bluemountaingallery.org Closing reception: Sunday, June 8, 2:30 - 5:30pm (646)(646 486-4730 Broadway Mall Community Center Aspire.AspiAAspAspire. pire. Broadway@96 St. (NYC) Center Island 181 WHITE STREET, DANBURY, CONN. WCSU.EDU/ART/MFA Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm ^ZHJU`'^ZHJU`VYN2131^^^^ZHJU`VYN 10 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 Gesture is Wedded to Emotion in Pierre Leclerc’s “Lest We Forget” series wo gestural strains have long been present In “Champs Élysées,” much more worked Tin French modernist art: automatic up surface in a palette of deep blue, yellow, drawing, often influenced by Asian calligraphy and red hues suggests a nocturnal view of as in the work of André Masson and Henri one of the brightest boulevards in the “City Michaux, and Tachisme, the European answer of Light.” The composition’s vibrant color to Abstract Expressionists, also known as contrasts are as dramatic as those in the Italian- Art Informal. Both tendencies apparently born U.S. Futurist painter Joseph Stella’s great assert themselves in the paintings of the canvas “Brooklyn Bridge.” Although Leclerc’s contemporary artist Pierre Leclerc. paint surface is thicker, his brushstrokes are Born in Montreal, Canada of French more expressively animated in the manner of extraction, Leclerc, an intuitive painter, states, “action painting.” Technique aside, however, “The abstract pieces that I create are an the inherent irony here is that, while the lights emotionally charged explosion of my inner on this fabled Parisian thoroughfare are so sensitivity and empathy. I believe that sadness bright as to blot out the stars, its name derives affects us more profoundly than happiness, and from the “Elysian Fields,” a pastoral paradise it forces us to look deeper into ourselves. I’ve where, according to Geek mythology, happy been painting for 20 years and the medium of souls dwelt after death for all eternity. acrylic on canvas allows me to reflect on grief, Yet another, even larger acrylic on canvas on “Einstein” human sorrow, calamity, nature, money and a nocturnal theme by Leclerc, “Magic Night,” power –– through a kaleidoscope of colours, suggests a magnificent fireworks display, with most likely created via an extemporaneous and without constraints. Catastrophic events rhythmically looping skeins, splashes, spatters impulse, is unmistakably a portrait. Was it and natural disasters, including the tragedy of of liquidly diluted white pigment transposed “discovered” by the artist in the manner of a September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, evoked over a fiery orange mass set against a deep blue Rorschach test, when he laid down a flurry powerful emotions within me, and paintings sky. of thick white strokes that called to mind the became a cathartic exercise.” While like the the majority of Leclerc’s great scientist’s mane of unruly white hair? A lover of nature and animal life, the artist’s compositions, “Magic Night” is painted in Or did Leclerc premeditate it in some more concern for our environment comes across acrylic on canvas; “Tsunami” obviously called deliberate manner, before putting brush to clearly in his large canvas “Ecosystem,” in out for the viscous texture of oil paint, with canvas? which swift vertical strokes of alizarin crimson its fiercely forceful white frosted impasto It’s finally a moot point, given the intersected by skeins and splashes of white and (apparently trowled on with a palette knife) immediacy and vital life that Pierre Leclerc’s green project both the energy and vulnerability rushing over the dark shore, as in an aerial painting exudes. –– Maurice Taplinger of nature. view of a tragedy in the making. The very fury Although he is a self-taught artist, certainly of his knife-strokes appears to demonstrate Pierre Leclerc, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th his training as an architect must inform the the artist’s emotional response to the natural Street, August 22 - September 11, 2014, sense of internal order in even a composition catastrophe. Reception: Thursday August 28, 6-8 pm as ostensibly spontaneous as this. Another work in oil, “Einstein,” although GENE POMPA WSAC acrylics on canvas form a dynamic inverted Continued from page 2 Continued from page 2 chevron. surface of the sky and the tactile impasto of between stylized neo-cubistic structuring and Nate Ladson, an accomplished realist the limbs and leaves. expressionist “push and pull.” best known for his detailed, atmospheric, Although both his parents are Italian, Amy Rosenfeld takes quite opposite and often nostalgic genre scenes of Generoso (thus the sobriquet “Gene,” with approaches in two acrylic compositions on African American life, also surprised us in which he signs his work) was born and spent canvas: “Spring Blossoms” sets small forms this exhibition with what for him was a part of his childhood in Alexandria, Egypt. resembling rainbow colored fingerprints relatively abstract composition in oil on But the family returned to Italy and settled swarming over a brilliant blue, yellow, and wood panel called “Double Exposure.” On in Rome when he was ten years old. There, violet field; while “Quilt” emits an even more closer viewing, however, it morphs into an he grew up in an artistic environment, since smoldering chromatic frisson, with roughly emotionally laden extreme closeup of a face both of his grandparents were opera singers, rectangular patches of hot orange red and engulfed in chiaroscuro, calling to mind the his parents were interested in all the arts, and yellow arranged like barbecue bricks on the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s great novel, his siblings have all gravitated toward creative two-dimensional picture plane. Both succeed “Invisible Man.” pursuits. by sheer virtue of Rosenfeld’s intrepid color Emily Rich is another artist who excavates In the 1980s, after a long sabbatical sense. mystery from reality in a watercolor and ink following the death of his father, he began to Richard Carlson has been pushing with composition on paper from her “Rooftop paint again and by the ‘90s his work veered admirable restraint at the boundaries of Series,” in which tenements and towers verge between surrealism and landscape painting, as grid-contained abstraction for so long that it on abstraction, their linear outlines partially he developed his unique oil relief technique. is almost startling to see him suddenly break dissolved in wet-in-to wet washes. Some One can’t help wondering if the subtle free in a bold new direction. Comprised viewers mainly familiar with Rich’s larger, patterning of his intricately paint-piled forms of diagonal stripes of subtly harmonized gestural abstract works in acrylic on canvas, was subconsciously influenced by the sinuous color, outlined with a neat black line like may discover another side of her artistic Islamic script seen everywhere in Egypt the figures and objects in a comic strip, two personality in the more intimate charm of this during his early childhood there. In any case, acrylics on canvas –– “Untitled (Gold Teal)” work on paper. –– Byron Coleman Gene Pompa has evolved a visual language and “Untitled (Blue Green)” –– can also be all his own that frequently touches upon the viewed as a diptych. Placed side by side, with sublime. –– Ed McCormack a strip of bare wall between them, the two

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 11 A.I.R. At New Century Gallery urating exhibitions is an art in itself and of the delicate little creatures and foliage deconstructs in various ingenious ways and Cwhen the curator is herself a participating enliven an otherwise monochromatic scene combines with sculpted figures to create artist the exhibition is bound to be all the like gleeful bursts of morning birdsong. intriguing 3-D tableaux at once metaphysical more artful. Thus curator Basha Maryanska Equally exhilarating is another embroidery- and metaphorical. In one such assemblage, gives us another thoughtfully assembled enhanced monochromatic print of tree-limbs titled “Sunburst Think 1,” a white statuette group exhibition in the show she calls “Art in upon which a tiny blue bird and a red bird entirely covered with blue veins, assumes the Residency.” converge, bearing twigs in their beaks –– as pose of Rodin’s “Thinker,” umbella’d by Virginia Donovan comes to her abstract though engaged in building a nest for pre- the bent-back cover of a book whose pages expressionist inflected landscape style after colored Easter eggs! fan out around him like the beams of the years of plein air painting out of doors. The Ask Bojana H. Leznicki why she took sunburst promised in the title. freshness of nature invariably informs all of up textiles as her artistic, as well as her “I often write my experiences in a journal,” her paintings. More recently, however a freer professional, medium, and she will say, Lai says, “but find it inadequate to convey use of color, spontaneous brushwork, and a “Weaving takes time. Restoration takes time. how I truly feel. So, I translate the paragraphs certain atmospheric hint of the metaphysical The process of weaving and working with to a visual form . . . . Oftentimes, the true has entered her work, as seen in Donovan’s fiber slows you down. It is like meditation. meaning of text and words are just beneath acrylic composition “Light Play on the Weaving, I spent long hours with myself, and that thin layer of their lexical meaning.” Mountain,” in which ethereal circular forms learned about myself. It is a beautiful and The epiphany, for the viewer, comes with float like luminous soap bubbles over soft quiet process of continuous self-discovery.” trying to interpret this artist’s meanings purple peaks. Sharp linear calligraphy figures To which one can only add that her work from the visual clues that he creates –– or prominently in a work in oil and mixed media provides a self-enriching experience for the perhaps from being simply entertained by titled “Early Autumn,” where autumnal viewer as well. the fanciful quality of a piece such as “Writers golden yellows that blaze like nature’s answer If one were to combine the exotic intricacy 1,” in which two of Lai’s white, vein-covered to neon and swirls of verdant green capture of Persian miniatures with the radiant, figures wielding quill pens crouch on two that vital moment when the seasons merge. light-filled colors of stained glass rendered books connected by cogs fashioned from Maria Angeles Hegglin heightens the on a contemporary scale, the results might rolled and furled loose pages. Daniel Lai, effects of nature in her own unique manner, resemble the compositions of the artist and it would appear, has created a brand new applying thick, brilliant impasto with a palette teacher Anita Wexler. For Wexler’s boldly postmodern take on surrealism with special knife to practically “carve” the forms of ruddy executed imagery projects a near-psychedelic appeal for bibliophiles. mountains; spread sunlight like melting energy, as seen in one brilliantly colorful Russell Cusick, a former operatic baritone butter over the desert floor; or score the spiky work in which a voluptuous female nude turned multimedia visual artist combines oil stickers into the protruding arms of cacti. covered with polka dots (as though by and acrylic painting with photography to Hegglin’s surgical skill with the knife lends the 1960s “Happenings” artist Kusama), dramatic effect in panoramic Hudson River the series she calls Arizona paintings a tactility embraces her lover, who is covered with Valley landscapes that follow in the exalted every bit as appealing as her hot, earthy, more angular designs. Surrounded by footsteps of Thomas Cole and Asher B. color, creating a winning combination of fanciful creatures amid an entire rainforest Durand. Usually mounted on long horizontal natural ruggedness and lyricism reminiscent of Day-Glo graffiti hues, they resemble an panels that suggest the scale and sweep of of Marsden Hartley, yet distinguished by her Aboriginal Adam and Eve. In another work that heavenly landscape, Cusick’s pictures own singular painterly sensibility. by Wexler, a monumental female nude (her amplify its beauty with their skillfully tweaked A textile conservator for museums, art only adornment four feathers dangling from hues. In “Hudson River from Little Stony dealer, and private collector, as well as a fiber one of her arms) is surrounded by an entire Point,” one of his most picturesque vistas, artist born in Bulgaria, Bojana H. Leznicki cosmos of floating symbols, apparently the verdant hills and valley meet the crystal has innovated a unique technique to merge created with stencils. Although Anita clear waters under a magnificent blue sky and prints and embroidery in a poetic synthesis as Wexler’s works are said to be inspired by her pearlescent clouds. In his “Chapel of Our magical and evocative in its own manner as Native American roots, in their more abstract Lady Hudson River Snow,” the scene takes the boxes and collages of Joseph Cornell. In aspects, her dazzling compositions could also on the quality of an ancient Chinese hand Leznicki’s mixed media composition “Good resemble exploding mandalas. scroll, with spidery winter trees surrounding Morning,” for example red birds and green Born in Malaysia of Chinese descent and the white columned facade of the chapel on buds enliven a grissaille tree with a suburban raised in Kuala Lumpur, Daniel Lai recycles Continued on page 15 house in the background. The vibrant hues discarded books which he reshapes and

12 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 Digital Photo Artist Peter Watson Paints with Light ith a little help from the viewers’ One such lightbox piece, the 48 by 72 Wimagination, the allusiveness of abstract inch “Kiss,” is a bold composition in glowing art can take an aural as well as visual turn. lipstick pinks, Day-Glo oranges, vibrant blues, One early example is how the pioneering and sultry violet hues. The sheer heat of American modernist Arthur Dove magically such colors creates a sensual optical sensation, combined forms and colors in his painting informed by Watson’s years of experience “Fog Horns” to evoke the mournful moans working with color theory in color labs and his that haunted him on foggy nights in the yawl widespread travels in various urban settings. in which he lived and painted off the shore Just as the Impressionists found inspiration in of the Long Island Sound. Another, more sunlight and its natural chiaroscuro it casts on recent, example is “Patchinko Sound,” a foliage and other aspects of landscape, Watson work in Duratrans/Acrylic by the Australian- is inspired by the artificial light with which born digital photography artist Peter Watson. contemporary humankind illuminates those “Patchinko Sound” For in this luminous composition, with its beehives we call cities. alcohol that Watson evokes in “Shimbashi swirls of glowing red, yellow and green dots “I devote a lot of time and research to the Glow.” Here, this dynamic contemporary against a black background, Watson manages location, subject matter, and execution of computer artist gives us a new slant on the not only to suggest the sound of metal balls my photographs,” he says. “Colour and light shadowy “Floating World” (i.e. “world of clattering around in one of those Japanese influences my feelings of the environment play and entertainment”) so often depicted gambling games, somewhere between a slot that I am in.” in Ukiyo-e prints of those long ago centuries machine and a pinball machine, but also These locations often have a very specific when Tokyo was still called Edo. the blazing neon-lit atmosphere of Tokyo’s atmosphere and character, as seen in By contrast, another striking lightbox Ginza district, where many of the patchinko another large lightbox piece that Watson “Lightfall,” suggests the more industrious parlors are located. calls “Shimbashi Glow.” Shimbashi, which side of the city, with its vertical blue forms “Light is the perfect material for translates into English as “new bridge,” is suggesting the glass facades of soaring abstraction –– you can move it and paint a section of Tokyo convenient to railroad skyscrapers, while rhythmic rainbow waves with it,” Watson says, a sentiment with which and subway stations, where white collar of iridescent color in the lower part of Don Flavin and other artists who use neon “salarymen” and their companions go to the composition create the sensation of a and fluorescent tubing would most likely unwind after work in a nocturnal playground veritable chromatic tsunami. agree. And to explore its possibilities to their known for dimly lit bars and restaurants, –– Marie R. Pagano fullest effect, some of Watson’s larger pieces as well as its lively red light district. All of are exhibited in light boxes, which not only this is evoked through the wispy floating Peter Watson, Agora Gallery, 530 W. 25th enhances their chromatic intensity but lends smoke-like forms, suggestive of phantom St., June 10 - July 1, 2014. Reception: them a substantial sculptural presence. figures and slightly illicit pleasures fueled by Thursday, June 12, 6 - 8 pm. G&S Classifieds opportunities WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from NOHO GALLERY is viewing portfolios in all media for our Chelsea location. Visit all geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft nohogallery.com for application form, or send SASE to Noho Gallery, Arts. Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, 530 West 25th Street, NY, NY 10011. email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & CATHARINE LORILLARD WOLFE ART CLUB, INC. Catharine Lorillard Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. Wolfe Art Club, Inc. 118th Annual Open Juried Exhibition at the National Arts Club, NY. December 2 - 19, 2014. Open to women artists. Media: Oil, Acrylic, Watercolor, Pastel, Graphics, and MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY The Montserrat Sculpture. Over $10,000 in awards. Entry fee: $40/Members, $45/Associates, $50/Non-Members. Contemporary Art Gallery has been successfully operating in New York City for the last 25 years and we Online entry deadline is September 19, 2014. Submit your entries at www.ShowSubmit.com. invite artists to send their resumes, artist statements, website info, and no more than 5 jpg images Download the prospectus at www.clwac.org. representative of your work, in order to be considered for a solo exhibition and/or to participate in our annual International Salon. Please send your information to [email protected] or mail it to THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE 547 W27th St., New York, NY 10001 with a SASE if you want it returned. •Learn how to use your body corrrectly. •Improve your posture. JADITE GALLERIES new gallery space available this Fall street level •Achieve lasting results. 660 10th Avenue NYC 10036 tel 212 977 6190 A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used successfuly for over a century. Learn how to use your body in a more efficient way which will have far-reaching benefits. It involves chang- ing old habits and learning new ones to last a lifetime. Please call for a private consultation and intro- ASIAN ARTS & CRAFTS ductory lesson. Union Square studio, or house and office calls available. Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, photo analysis, intro lesson plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. 212-734-7875

Offering a variety Visit our store of artifacts MAILBOXES & Michael R. Horenstein depicting BEYOND INC. Attorney & Counsellor at Law Lord Ganesh A full supply of ± Arts Law, Provenance Concerns and a rich shipping needs and ± General Business Law assortment of services, including ± Contract Drafting & Review Asian specialty Fine Art Packaging. ± Corporate Law & Company Formation items and 217 East 85th St. ± Commercial Litigation antiques. New York, NY 10028 437 East 80th Street, No. 27, New York NY 10075 [email protected] Tel 212 772 7909 Ph: (212) 517-7340 Email: [email protected] JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 13 Catherine Garceran: Art in the Face of Adversity s Chuck AClose proved when he accomplished arguably some of the best paintings of his career after a suffering a devastating spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair and made it necessary for his brushes to be strapped to his hands in order to work, overcoming adversity sometimes strengthens an artist’s commitment. “When I discovered, four years ago that I have Parkinson’s disease,” states the French painter Catherine “Mister Mister” Garceran, “I experienced horizontal format “Chat Botté,” however, Garceran appears to agree with the Art great loneliness, anger, and a sense of rather than radiating outward, Garceran’s Brut master Jean Dubuffet that so-called injustice. I poured these emotions into central shapes appear to implode inward. “high culture” can often be “asphyxiating.” my first abstract works, and the creations I Set against a pale blue field, cursive strokes Garceran’s practice of working not only present today are my expression of hope. of creamy white impasto are bolstered with the usual brushes, palette knives, and I now use my left hand, and often work by convoluted gestures of darker blue sponges, but also with less conventional with tools not generally considered as and fine spatters of gray. The title of the household implements such as silverware, intended for painting –– but the results are painting, alluding to a famous fairy tale, window cleaning tools, and other extraordinary. My art is my way of telling translates into English as “Puss in Boots.” instruments that she employs to apply the world: “Hope gives you wings and However, subjective interpretation being paint, scrape into thick pigment, scratch courage.” one of the joys of abstract painting, one into, or otherwise distress her surfaces Although one might be tempted to viewer feels free to confess that for him, lends her paintings considerable tactile, as compare Garceran’s vigorous, spontaneous the composition of “Chat Botté,” also well as visual, interest. approach to form, line, and color to the conjured the effect of a moodily brewing Such textural effects are especially Abstract Expressionists, her paintings are storm cloud. appealing in the scored surface of the actually more in the mode of Tachisme, On the other hand, in “Mister Mister,” explosions of white impasto enlivening the its European first cousin. That Garceran’s another acrylic painting by Garceran, burnished, copper-colored ground of “A canvasses are generally on a relatively the various painterly gestures are all Coeur Ouvert.” The title, which translates intimate easel-size, rather than on the contained within a roughly rectangular as “Open Heart,” expresses the honest, often overblown muralistic scale of those white form “framed” within the canvas by direct quality of Catherine Garceran’s American macho cowboys like Pollock and a surrounding gray ground. Among the paintings, as well as the generous spirit with Company, also connects her to the more boldly delineated abstract red, black and which she offers them, to share her “wings refined tradition of European modernism. gray, strokes within the white rectangle a and courage” with others. Like Wols, particularly, Garceran tends simplified face is clearly discernible. Perhaps –– Peter Wiley toward compositions in which her painterly it is that of Mister Mister himself! Here, gestures, marks, and strokes emanate the artist’s sophisticated yet faux-primitive outward from the approximate center of figurativism is akin to that of the Cobra Catherine Garceran, Agora Gallery, an overall color field in the manner of an Group and A.R. Penck. For like both that 530 West 25th Street, July 5 - 25, 2014. explosive bundle of energy. Northern European art movement and the Reception: Thursday July 10, 6 -8 pm In her acrylic on canvas in a long contemporary german Neo-Expressionist,

14 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 A.I.R. vigorous brushwork. aquarelle, when its luminous transparency Continued from page 12 The fiber artist Helga Santel, on the is explored and exploited by an artist the snowy shore and golden lights other hand, employs woven wool as her who knows how to control the happy glowing like votive candles off in the medium, creating fanciful compositions “accidents” that occur when the medium distance, against the bare woods and often inspired by simplified floral forms, as is handled spontaneously. It is interesting dusk sky. Something of a departure, yet seen in “Sommer 1,” where a frontal row to ponder whether Pushparaj’s years apropos in context, is Cusick’s candid of almost cartoon-like, pink and blue- of studying microbiology as a hospital portrait of Hudson River Conservation’s violet flowers thrusts skyward on stout pathologist before she retired and took patron saint Peter Seeger. As a smiling green stems. The composition is at once up painting has influenced the sense of little girl in a pink tie-die sweatshirt with a primitive and slyly sophisticated with the discovery that comes across in her work. deign painted on her cheek taps his elbow plants appearing to strut and preen like a In any case, her pictures bloom brightly to get his attention, the elderly, white line of cartoon chorus girls. Caipirinha 1” and take on a vital life of their own, bearded folk music legend makes his way is considerably more abstract, its floating particularly in her “overall” compositions toward the stage, clutching his banjo, its shapes suggesting easter eggs and other where an entire spectrum of brilliant head emblazoned with the slogan, “This vaguely defined images and objects set hues create a swarming energy akin to machine surrounds hate, and forces it to against a vibrant green ground. The that in an abstraction by Jackson Pollock. surrender.” fascinating thing about Helga Santel’s The viewer feels as though immersed in Although diluted paint applied in compositions is their combination of a veritable botanical garden of brightly drips is part of the gestural vocabulary of innocence and visual wisdom. Although blooming forms. abstract expressionism, the Polish-born one is told that she employs state of the The variousness of curator Basha painter Maryla Wierzbowska employs art computer techniques to conceive Maryanska’s aesthetic is every bit as the same technique to capture a sense them, her forms have an almost childlike evident in her own painterly oeuvre of the atmosphere and energy of nature abstract freedom reminiscent of Klee and as in her curatorial choices. Indeed in her large canvases. In the work which Kandinsky. Maryanska’s versatility calls to mind the translates into English as “My Garden, Esther Sternberg considers herself an New Yorker art reviewer Peter Schjeldahl’s South Side,” luminous green and blue artist/photographer, but although her remark to the effect that Sigmar Polke’s vertical streaks shimmer in a manner experience in photography has influenced retrospective at MoMA has all the richness akin to certain paintings by Monet for her paintings, on face value they are classic of a group exhibition. Two of her works their liquidic radiance. Equally flowing examples of expressionism executed in in the present exhibition, in particular, is “Rainy,” another lyrical painting oil paints. Her colors are fiercely intense, demonstrate Maryanska’s refusal to limit featuring a subtle chromatic sonata of particularly in “Ocean Storm,” a study in herself to a single style: “Where is my vertical drips falling into a horizontal flow nocturnal blues, featuring a lone, empty Way?” depicts a large mountainous form suggesting a green body of water. As the rowboat in the foreground beside a pier looming above a metaphysical landscape title implies, this picture projects a sense on which three large potted bouquets where every color is phosphorescent in of total saturation with its many shining have been abandoned. The plants’ big its intensity and such is the vitality of her and subtle tones and active surface effects. green leaves blow in the wind and some brushstrokes in which the earth itself Yet another mood, serene, decorative of their orange petals are being carried appears to surge like a river. Almost as and verging on chinoiserie, is evoked by off against the deep blue sky while white if to answer the question asked by the Wierzbowska’s large canvas “Mewki” (a foam rises on the even deeper blue waves. title of the previous painting, “Ocean Polish word for “bird”), in which three Like all of Sternberg’s paintings, it is an Meditation,” another composition, in white avian forms sail toward an urban exercise in frenetic brushwork, with every which painterly blue waves seamlessly skyline illuminated by many brilliant form thickly loaded with pigment and traverse one square canvas with a smaller yellow windows. laid down in rhythmic strokes. Even in panel indented at its center, combining Working mainly in oil and paint stick another oil called “Sunlight in California,” elements of realism with geometrical on canvas and wood panels, Sandra the colors are unexpectedly dark; the abstraction, appears to assert: “Wherever Benhaim creates what the artist refers to dominant forms are large red palms, with your imagination takes you!” as “little pieces of landscape” within an sinuous red and yellow veins, leaping like Indeed, as seen in yet another overall context of abstraction. Elements flames. As in all of Esther Sternberg’s composition called “Visiting Las Vegas,” of collage also figure prominently in paintings, this is a subjective vision of in which the artist bypasses the neon- Benhaim’s paintings: fragments of nature, rather than an Impressionistic lit attractions of The Strip to give us a maps, colorful flyers, scraps of magazine transcription of its outer facets: the deliciously tactile mixed media work on pictures gathered from the painter’s shadow side of sunlight, so to speak. wood, interpreting the timeless desert trips to faraway places such as Paris and In her floral compositions in watercolor itself in purely abstract terms, Basha the Bahamas. A sense of windblown Neela Pushparaj reverses the process Maryanska, has already had spectacular memories and fantasies comes across in by which many other artists arrive at success in doing just that. paintings such as Benhaim’s “Carpet abstraction through realism. She often –– Wilson Wong Ride Redux,” in which ornate bits of starts with the “wet into wet” technique, patterned paper float under and over areas randomly applying pure color onto of semitransparent and opaque areas of pre-dampened sheets of paper, then orange, blue, and pink paint suggesting discovering and emphasizing with her sunlight, sea, and perhaps the pink flesh brush the shapes that are suggested as the of bathers. In other paintings, such as colors spread out of their own accord, “Exploring Ganymede,” the artist herself in much the natural manner that actual “Art in Residency,” through June 7, 2014, bathes in the freedom of pure painterly flowers bud, bloom, and grow. The at New Century Artists Gallery, sensuousness, employing an entire method endows her compositions with a 530 West 25th Street. palette of vibrant colors energized by her freshness that can only be achieved with

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 15 Mother India: Amrita Sher-Gil and the Birth of Indian Modernism by Ed McCormack

that Francis Newton Souza through a number of stylistic changes, at was one of the pioneering his best Souza was a powerful painter and a figures of what Midnight to master draftsman. the Boom: Painting in India Nowhere was this made clearer than in after Independence, the a bountiful live auction of works from the catalog of a major exhibition collection of the artist’s daughter Keren at the Peabody Essex Souza Kohn held at Saffronart Mumbai Museum, published last year last year. The beautifully designed catalog by Thames & Hudson, refers included many drawings, and oil paintings to as, “A revolutionary art such as “Untitled (Nude with Suspenders, movement [that] asserted 1968),” a vigorously brushed coloristic itself in India between the tour de force dominated by the Amazonian declaration of independence figure of a voluptuous nude in a bright at midnight on August 15, green garter belt, set against a tactile, bright 1947, and the economic red background; and The Game, a huge boom of the 1990s.” allegorical canvas from 1987. In the latter The year that the canvas work, a baseball game that the artist and came haphazardly into my his daughter attended while in New York is hands, however, the boom transformed into a kind of perverse Roman had not yet gotten fully Circus, with the addition of a nude woman underway. So I felt like I sliding into a base, while a nude male, his had really lucked out and balls dangling from behind like those of a gotten away with something bull, leans over and tags her with claw-like marvelous when, after doing fingers, as an umpire raises a hand in the air first became acquainted with the art of a quick restoration job to declare her out. Imodern India just a few years ago in a on the painting (filling in a minor scratch “He had the vision,” says Keren Souza most peculiar way. It’s a story I’ve told so on a black area with many times since that even I’m tired of some Japanese sumi ink it by now. So I’ll give you the abridged rubbed in with the tip version: My wife always said that my habit of my finger), I walked of rummaging in other peoples’ garbage it over to Sotheby’s, and made strolling down the street with me they auctioned it off for like walking a dog. Then one day, off my $6,000. leash and out strolling alone, I noticed Thereafter, when an easel-size painting on canvas leaning I regaled friends and against a garbage can on East 83rd Street, acquaintances with right around the corner from our building. the tale of my triumph Perhaps confirming the canine tendencies in Indian modern art that Jeannie attributes to me, I could tell marketing, I ended with by sniffing it that it was an oil, rather than the punch line: “Now an acrylic. It was a terrible painting: an when I go out alone, architectural atrocity of spiky spires and Jeannie always says, ham-handed angular outlines in a palette of ‘Don’t forget to check the F.N. Souza, “The Game,” Image courtesy Saffronart murky grays and muddy earth tones. But garbage!’” something about the big showy signature I didn’t stop crowing about it until just Kohn, who served as his assistant on the at the top of the composition –– Souza a few years ago, when I started receiving large canvas, filling in areas of flat color for ‘57–– seemed to ring a bell. Especially after I catalogues for online auctions of Modern him to energize with his own distinctive turned it around and saw the same surname and Contemporary Indian Art from brushwork, “to take a picture of an scrawled across the back of the canvas, and Saffronart, a global company, founded in American baseball game in an arena with the initials F.N. added, along with the title: 2000, with gallery spaces in Mumbai, Delhi spectators and a referee and transpose it into “The Castle.” and New York and offices in London. For it an indictment of human society . . .” “God, that’s an awful looking thing,” turned out that the joke was on me. Now a “I want to do everything,” Souza once Jeannie said when I walked in the door with it. painting by Souza, who was born in 1924 declared with that gift he had for making “I know,” I said. “It looks like an and died in 2002, of roughly the same wildly self-dramatizing statements in the imitation of Bernard Buffet –– as if Buffet size and period as the one I sold through manner of Gully Jimson, the eccentric himself isn’t bad enough!” Sotheby’s can command anywhere from bohemian painter-protagonist of Joyce “So why did you bring it home?” $250, 000 to $300,000 dollars at auction. Cary’s comic novel, The Horse’s Mouth: “to “At first I thought I might put gesso over And now, having seen much more of his make others suffer, to make myself suffer. I it, and maybe you could use the canvas to oeuvre, I know that despite my initial have no desire to redeem myself or anyone paint on,” I told her. “But then something impression from that lone orphaned canvas else because man is by his very nature struck me as familiar about the name of the I rescued from the sanitation department, unredeemable, yet he hankers so desperately artist. I think I’ll look it up.” Souza was no schlockmeister in the Bernard after redemption. I want to hang myself on To make a long story short, I learned Buffet mold. Rather, although he went a cross with both hands and feet nailed to

16 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 art draftsman over the course of his career, a happy time for him,” Priyanka told me. Souza learned a lot from Picasso. Indeed, “He came here with great hopes, but his his sharp visual wit in satirizing human marriage failed and he ended up living very foibles was equal to that of Steinberg, and poorly and in ill health . . .” the fluidity of his line often approached that Although she was too young to have of the Spanish master himself, as he drew known Souza personally, like everyone else on any available surface including magazine in the Indian art community, Priyanka had and newspaper photos, turning the faces heard all the juicy stories. With the relish we of grinning businessmen or politicians into reserve for those whose miseries fame makes grimacing beasts, or brushing gouache over colorful, she spoke of the artist’s legendary them to create the works he called “chemical drinking binges and womanizing. Giggling alterations,” in which the colors of the paint a little, she told an anecdote about a couple and the printer’s ink melded to create new of young married art collectors in India colors, possessed of a uniquely garish beauty. who loved Souza’s work and were thrilled But it was the swift grace and scalpel-like when they finally got a chance to visit him. precision of his naked pen alone that gave Although the details now escape me, the him the ability to impart a classical quality gist of her gossip was that the husband to raunchy subjects, with which he made his “discovered his wife with Souza, naked, in a own contemporary contribution to India’s compromising position.” F.N. Souza, “Last Howl from the Cross,” glorious erotic art tradition, delineating Even before the boom, she explained, © Image courtesy Saffron Art sensual female nudes proudly displaying Souza could get away with the most it. . . .” their genitals; revealing his intimate outrageous behavior because people in the Souza’s crucifixions are among his fiercest memories and fantasies in exquisitely explicit Indian art scene looked at him as something works, with a quality of the grotesque that and exuberant ink drawings such as Untitled of a god. He was the first to break out can remind one, in spirit if not in style, of Francis Bacon’s paintings of monstrous popes. Witness his large 1963 oil, “Last Howl from the Cross,” in which the Christ figure writhing on the cross sports a spiky black Keith Richards hairstyle and bares fang-like teeth –– a bit like those of the Rolling Stones guitarist as well, come to think of it, before he had them fixed! Living up to its possibly Allen Ginsberg-influenced title, it is a picture as viscerally grisly as the German gothic master Grunewald’s famous alterpiece. As readers who’ve been through a similarly guilt-producing religious drill may surmise from his bitter tone, Souza was raised as a Catholic by a devout mother who was left bereft of all but her faith in Jesus when her salesman husband died young while little Francis Newton was barely three years old. After he miraculously survived a particularly virulent case of childhood smallpox, she pledged the boy to the priesthood. But the kid already had other ideas: He later confessed to drawing his mother nude when she bathed “through a hole I bored in the door,” and speculated that he had probably even “painted on the F.N. Souza Untitled (Two figures and a F.N. Souza Untitled (Three figures in walls of her womb.” shadow on a bed), Image courtesy Saffron Art bed), Image courtesy Saffron Art More easy to verify is that he was expelled for making pornographic drawings on (Two Figures and Shadows on a Bed) and of the colonial mode in his art and even the walls of the Jesuit school in which she Untitled (Three Figures on a Bed), both his outrageous personal life seemed to enrolled him. Catholicism, he later said, had from 1968. symbolize a new kind of freedom. failed to convince him “that the glorious Such a lust for life! And so sad that it So it’s very sad how it all ended,” eroticism of Indian art was the world of the all ended badly, according to Priyanka Priyanka sighed. “Toward the end of his life barbarous heathen.” Mathews, an Indian art dealer I spoke with he was living somewhere on the Lower East Like Saul Steinberg, the brilliant some years ago in a now defunct New York Side, spending all his money on booze . . . Romanian-born New Yorker cartoonist who gallery called Artsindia. He literally drank himself to death.” matured into a marvelously inventive fine “Souza’s last years in New York were not Continued on page 20

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 17 Dorothy Culpepper Continues to Evolve felt as though I might be coming down silver range. / Stars are out and there is sea example is the picture she calls “Skydiving Iwith something, possibly one of those nasty / enough beneath the glistening earth / to Above Blue.” in which her vivacious linear summer colds that can hang on for the entire bear me toward the future / which is not so calligraphy is still very much present. Here, season, as one goes from the extreme heat dark. I see.” however, her whiplash skeins red and yellow outside to the chill of air conditioning indoors, To put it quite simply, while I’m not about and blue are at once more relaxed and grand, on the day I had an advance look at the new to reverse my stubborn critical conviction as they dance gingerly over two large shapes works selected for Dorothy A. Culpepper’s that the only thing good art can cure is a that show through them as if through an upcoming solo exhibition at Montserrat the sense of aesthetic doldrums that can animated scrim lit from behind. Although Contemporary Art in Chelsea. As I went from come from being exposed to so much these two forms are, respectively, red and painting to painting, taking notes, for some bad art, I must admit that the warm light yellow, they suggest clouds ﬂoating over reason the opening lines of a poem by Frank emanating from Dorothy A. Culpepper’s a horizontal area near the bottom of the O’Hara, the legendary MoMA curator and new paintings seemed to erase my symptoms, composition of a more subdued blue hue laureate of the New York School in the 1950s, and the much-dreaded summer cold never than the blue calligraphy. Stretching across came to mind: “I am ill today but I am not / materialized. For these works, although the full width of the composition, the uneven too ill. I am not ill at all...” modest in their dimensions (compared to curves of this blue area suggest varied peaks Let me ﬁrst make clear that people like some of her gargantuan-scale pieces of the of a mountain range.

“Stress in Motion” “Skull Spider” me, who make a daily business of looking at past), yet filled with light and air, are some of Although it is never completely wise to and writing about painting and sculpture do Culpepper’s best and most ... magical (There! Rorschach too specific imagery into the forms not generally believe that art “heals.” That I said it!) works to date. of an artist like Culpepper, whose work is stuff, we like to believe, is for so-called art For one thing, they are not only more adamantly abstract and inhabits the purely therapists and New Age air heads, since art intimate in scale than many of her previous metaphysical space of painting itself, yet as the should not be confused with an all-around paintings, but they are simpler a word one writer of an early review of her work hinted panacea. But, as I took in Culpepper’s chooses to use here in the very best sense over a decade ago, one is always tempted to new compositions, their sunny colors and of the term. Which is to say: even her more excavate “the landscape within.” And indeed, buoyant forms, the fog began to lift and the intricately configured ones, which could be the artist herself stated at that time, “I feel my concluding lines of O’Hara’s poem (the title said to bear the most resemblance to her paintings are portraits of a landscape that is of which I could not recall) appeared as if by older, more complex compositions, have within, a visual monument of space and time.” magic in my mind: “They’ll never fence the achieved a new kind of formal clarity. One Culpepper has also said that she regards

18 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 paint itself as “an extension of my feelings abstractions with which he made his initial delineated by those blotted lines, the colors and moods.” And if we take that statement reputation to the late figurative paintings, within them –– vibrant reds, pinks, purples, literally –– as we probably should, since she which were destined to profoundly influence blues, and greens –– are unified by a smooth is generally more forthright than many other an entire generation of postmodern New yellow ground as clear and bright as that of contemporary painters, when it comes to Image painters. For in Culpepper’s somewhat Dick Tracy’s famous fedora! articulating her motivations and intentions –– anomalous group of small acrylics the But perhaps the most chromatically the impressive clarity of this composition and colors are comic strip bright, unmodulated, sumptuous and startling of Culpepper’s others in this exhibition suggests that she has and smoothly applied and the forms are new paintings is “Black Dot Seen,” a kind achieved a new wisdom and serenity. roughly geometrical. Roughly, one says, of attention test for the viewer, in which This comes across perhaps most because the circles rectangles and triangles the component to which the painting’s dramatically in a group of paintings that, at in the compositions were obviously created title refers to is exactly that –– a tiny black first glance, appear somewhat anomalous freehand, rather than ruled, and the black dot on the pale yet luminous lime-sherbet- in the context of her entire oeuvre up to outlines containing them and separating green rectangle almost at the center of the this point –– almost startlingly so, in much one color from another are rendered in a composition. One says “almost” at the the same way that de Kooning’s late period somewhat blotted manner that makes clear center, since despite being made up entirely compositions with the simpler lines and that this most expressively gestural painter of rectangles and squares, not one of the

“Red Triangle” “Black Dot Seen” clearer color areas struck one, until it was is not going “hard-edge” on us. Rather, elements in the composition is “plumb possible to view them in the context of his she is trying on a blithe new acrylic style square,” as carpenters say. For Dorothy A. entire career in his 60-year retrospective in that bears a certain relationship to artists Culpepper is above all else an extraordinarily 2011 at The Whitney Museum. like Miro and Calder. The relationship to expressive painter, even in this the For this group of paintings, which includes the bright, childlike gouaches of the latter uncharacteristically restrained group of works. “Red Triangle,” “Black Dot Seen,” and painter and mobile maker, particularly, What sets them apart from the work “The Circle Crowd,” can only be seen as may be most immediately apparent in of those by artists known for geometric a radical departure for Culpepper. In fact, “The Circle Crowd,” where the red, blue, compositions, in fact, is their deliberate some of those who are particularly partial green and orange circles, set against a white “lopsidedness,” the peculiar unevenness of to her freewheeling gestural compositions ground, suggest festive balloons bumping the lines enclosing the shapes, and the odd could possibly see them as a travesty or even each other in midair in a small white room. offbeat beauty of the artist’s color harmonies; a “betrayal” in the way that even some of his But the kinship with Miro, as well as with how Culpepper’s matte browns play off cohorts among the Abstract Expressionists certain works by Paul Klee is keener in “Red against her purples, oranges and pale greens; resented the transition that Philip Guston Triangle,” where, while the forms are still that bluish aquamarine works with that made in the late 60s career from the lyrical precisely rendered, yet somewhat raggedly, Continued on page 22

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 19 India’s Hindu majority, and he finally had as he does now, among several lavish to leave the country. apartments and villas here in Dubai –– or “He became increasingly populist,” rather, cruising among them in one of Bean tells us, “and connected to Indian his five costly thrill machines, including a popular culture. In 1968, he loaded a lipstick-red Ferrari, his current favorite.” cart with paintings from his ‘Ramayana’ Even while sporting aviator sunglasses series, hitched up oxen, and went to and traveling in style, with his long white share the works with village people in hair and beard, Husain cut a stately ethnic Andhra Pradesh. At the same time, he figure, often barefoot in his guru-like unabashedly manipulated the art-world robes. Yet like the writer Salmon Rushdie, elite, demanding unprecedented prices he was the first visual artist to be hounded because he understood the relationship out of the country by what the writer of between cost and an artist’s standing.” his Time obit referred to as a “modern After he succumbed to a heart attack in curse: India’s politicized religious London in 2011 at the age of 95, Time sectarianism.” magazine’s obituary was headlined “M.F. * * * Husain, India’s Picasso, Dies in Exile.” One of the heaviest burdens Indian Forced to flee India in 2006, “after artists had to shoulder as they emerged religious zealots took offense to certain into the global art arena was being paintings that depicted Hindu goddesses compared to Western models, since being in the nude, he faced death threats. This absorbed into someone else’s legend Thames&Hudson, Midnight to the Boom: seemed an irony, the author of the obit, invariably makes one seem second-rate. Painting in India After Independence, Ishaan Tharoor, pointed out, in a country Thus flattering as it may have been to Published by the Peabody Essex Museum “which is home to so many ancient holy M.F. Husain’s ghost and beneficial to the in association with Thames & Hudson temples that teem with delicate, sensual fortunes of his future heirs, when Time’s thamesandhudsonusa.com carvings of deities in the nude.” well-meaning obituary dubbed him Continued from page 17 Self-imposed exile, however, did little “India’s Picasso,” it is doubtful that his If F.N. Souza was the self-destructive, to interfere with Husain’s accustomed posthumous critical reputation benefitted bad boy genius of postcolonial Indian life-style, according to a reporter for the from that ludicrously fulsome designation. modernism, M.F. Husain, born in 1915, New York Times, who caught up with The same goes for the pioneering 20th was to become the movement’s biggest him in Dubai in 2008, the year one of century woman painter Amrita Sher- success story. In fact, it was Souza himself, his paintings fetched $ 1.6 million dollars Gil, whom the critic Petra Power called who introduced Maqbool Fida Husain to in an auction at Christie’s: “[Husain] “India’s Frida Kahlo,” even though, aside the newly formed avant garde Progressive says he has always been a vagabond, from both being third world women Artists Group in the late 1940s, the year sleeping on the Mumbai streets during his artists at a time when that was a double of independence. In 1947 the newcomer impoverished youth, wandering through disadvantage, they had very little in won an Award at the Bombay Art Society Europe to study Rembrandt, or bouncing, common. For while Kahlo, the painter exhibition and began his remarkable of countless masochistic self-portraits, ascent. In Midnight to the Boom, the book’s editor Susan S. Bean writes of Husain, that he “achieved a celebrity in India reserved for film stars and politicians. His murals in airports, hotels, and public buildings have been seen by millions. He hobnobbed with the Nehru-Gandhi family, Bollywood stars, and Mother Theresa. His paintings likewise are larger than life, projecting the epic of India’s people and civilization in a thoroughly modernist language.” One could argue that Husain’s paintings, with their somewhat tamely stylized, Cubist-inflected forms and tastefully harmonized earth colors, are much less radical than Souza’s; that he pandered more safely, not to mention much more profitably –– to the new nation’s pride in itself, with his heroically symbolic rearing horses and monumental peasant couples, as sentimental, for M. F. Husain, Peasant Couple, 1950, oil all their cubistic leanings, as Soviet on canvas. Peabody Essex Museum, gift of propaganda posters. He was above all an the Chester and Davida Herwitz expert self promotor –– at the least in the Collection. © The Estate of M. F. Husain. years before the Muslim artist created Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, some images that managed to anger M. F. Husain, Untitled 1998, photograph by Walter Silver. Image courtesy Saffronart 20 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 was the captive victim of her damaged suddenly ill, slipped into a coma, and spine and her overbearing husband, died around midnight on December the celebrated Mexican muralist Diego sixth, 1941 at the age of 28. Although Riviera, in both her life and her art, Sher- the reason for her death has never been Gil was a liberated bohemian, and her determined, peritonitis following a paintings embraced an entire continent. botched abortion has been suggested as a Born to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil possible cause. Her mother, however, who Majithia, a Sikh aristocrat and an artist had never liked her physician son-in-law in his right as one of India’s pioneer anyway and had opposed the marriage, photographers, and Marie Antoinette accused Victor of murdering her. But that Gottesmann, a Hungarian Jewish opera suspicion would not be legally pursued, singer, at the age of sixteen Amrita Sher- since the day after Amrita’s death, Gil was already showing such a prodigious England declared war on Hungary and gift for drawing and painting that her Victor was jailed as a national enemy. mother took her to Paris to study at Ecole It’s the stuff of a Bollywood film or des Beaux-Arts. There she was inspired by a BBC miniseries, and one can only European painters such as Cézanne and speculate on whether Sher-Gil would Gauguin, although her first important have become better known had she painting, “Young Girls” appeared more lived into the postcolonial years, when beholden to the domestic Impressionism The Progressive Artists Group, formed of Berthe Moriset. This already on the on eve of Independence, and accomplished canvas, depicting an Indian their supporters among India’s cultural girl and a European friend in intimate academics and intelligencia ushered drawing room conversation –– perhaps in a more receptive attitude toward an unconscious symbol of the diverse homegrown modern art. Surely, Souza, cultural currents that would inform her Husain, Raza and their colleagues in mature work –– led to her election as the Amrita Sher-Gil Untitled (Zebegény that bohemian boy’s club would have youngest, and only Asian, artist in the Landscape) c. 1931 Oil on board welcomed so lovely and charming a young Grand Salon in 1933. 24 x 16 in | 61.0 x 40.6 cm, Image courtesy woman with open arms in the role of Predictably, Sher-Gil’s blooming Saffronart model, mistress, or muse. But whether beauty, like that of an exotic flower to their impregnable, competitive male egos French eyes, and her vivacious personality spirit of unity into practice in her personal would have accepted any woman, even also made her a big hit in the cafe society life when she married her Hungarian first one so talented, as an artistic colleague of bohemian Paris. Soon, however, she cousin Dr. Victor Egan in 1938. After a and equal remains questionable. “began to be haunted by an intense stay at her parents’ home in Saraya, they Today, however, Amrita Sher-Gil’s longing to return to India ... feeling in moved to a townhouse in Lahore with life and work serves as an inspiration to some strange way that there lay my destiny a large studio on its top floor. Being a many of the artists covered in the last as a painter.” As she wrote to a friend: “I strikingly beautiful woman, however, with two sections of Midnight to the Boom, can only paint in India. Europe belongs to a bohemian attitude acquired early in life, “Midnight’s Children: The Second Picasso, Matisse, Braque ... India belongs as well as an appetite for varied sensual Generation,” and “New Mediators: The only to me.” experiences, Sher-Gil continued to attract Third Generation.” Her apprenticeship in Paris had suitors of both sexes. Nehru himself had In fact, I was introduced to her made her proficient in the techniques been charmed by her glamour, and among work and led to research her life by a of Western oil painting, but back home her lovers were the noted British journalist reproduction in that book of a painting by in India, she was eager to discover her Malcolm Muggeridge and a mysterious a woman artist of the Third Generation “roots” and apply them to a new style that beauty named Marie Louise, who is named Nalini Malani. Titled would express both sides of her mixed believed to be pictured with the artist in Old Arguments on Indigenism, 1989, it heritage. She studied Mughal and Pahari the nude double-portrait, “Two Girls.” depicts Frida Kahlo and Sher-Gil sitting miniatures, as well as the cave paintings During her all too short life span seated side by side. Although the two at Ajanta, and toured Southern India, Sher-Gil would be better known for her women never met, nor did either of where she felt deep empathy for the “scandalous” love affairs than for her them ever give birth, each is posed like poor villagers whose lives were much less art. Only years later would her art and a Madonna. Kahlo cradles a “mini-me” privileged than her own. And in 1973, legacy be celebrated posthumously when nude figure, its torso covered in the blood she succeeded splendidly at wedding the government of India declared her of her marital and medical martyrdom. elements of classical Indian art and paintings, most of which are now housed Like the mother of twins, Sher-Gil cuddles modernism in her trilogy of oils, Bride’s in the National Gallery of Modern Art two miniature nudes, one of a voluptuous Toilet, Brahmacharis, and South Indian in New Delhi, as National Treasures. In Indian dancer adopted from a temple Villagers Going to Market.” In these 1978, a stamp reproducing her painting sculpture, the other copied directly compositions, with their combination of Hill Women was issued by India Post. from her painting “Two Girls,” perhaps warm earthy colors and brighter sunlit And in 1995, Salman Rushdie based the alluding to her divided sexual nature. hues, starkly simplified figures, and strong memorable character Aurora Zogoiby in The book’s text tells us, “In the 1990’s, pictorial rhythms, she achieved a synthesis his novel “The Moor’s Last Sigh” on her. Nalini Malani was one of the vanguard that gave the lie to Kipling’s racist theory Unfortunately, she didn’t live to enjoy artists who sought to take art in India about East and West being twains that all the belated recognition. Just days in new directions. She transformed her could never meet. It might be imagined before the opening of her first major painting practice, integrating performance, that she also attempted to put the same solo exhibition in Lahore, Sher-Gil took Continued on page 23 JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 21 “Hovering over Red”

“Writing in Code” CULPEPPER with an almost Asian Continued from page 19 spareness that can be particular pink, and the figure to ground favorably compare tensions that result from how many of to Jackson Pollock’s the most prominent circles, squares and (for him) anomalous rectangles in these compositions partake of composition “The that delicious Dick Tracy’s-hat yellow that Deep.” also dominates “Red Triangle” (despite its At the same time, title). Culpepper continues Whether Culpepper intends to take this to create more heavily new mode of working further, or merely to pigment-loaded and integrate it into her more familiar gestural altogether intricate manner remains to be seen. One who has paintings which, one been studying her paintings for several years becomes increasingly now can only guess that these paintings must aware of while taking be as of much of a surprise to the artist as in the pieces slated they are the rest of us, and that she is well for this exhibition, “The Circle Crowd” aware of what a rare and wonderful thing it is are as dynamic at in art when one manages to surprise oneself. easel-size as they are at wall-size, since the emblazoned with rhythmically crisscrossing So there can be little chance that she will not sense of scale within the former is every yellow, and white calligraphic loops. take advantage of this new gift in one way bit as expansive as that of the latter. The Several other characteristically intricate and or another. In fact, there are signs that she wonderfully titled “Skull Spider,” the sheer vigorous gestural compositions –– among may already be doing so, in a painting called ambition of which far exceeds its actual them “Hovering Over Red,” “Jump Up, “Writing in Code.” dimensions is one such work. Its pièce de Jump Down,” and “Falling from the Sky” –– Set against a slightly green-tinted off- résistance is an emblematic central form, should serve to reassure longtime admirers white ground, its composition consists made up of a configuration of many layers of that Dorothy A. Culpepper is staying the of only three broad horizontal stripes of red lines that coalesce in places to create an course, even as she continues to grow. red, yellow, and blue, loosely made up of overall shape with contours resembling those –– Byron Coleman Culpepper’s vigorous linear calligraphy. of an old-fashioned Valentine candy box. Dorothy A. Culpepper’s solo show It is a work at once sublimely simple and But instead of chocolates this symbolic heart can be seen from July 8 - 26, 2014. exquisitely complex in a manner that could emits a squiggly biomorphic shape suggesting Reception: July10 , 6 - 8 pm. be said to marry the artist’s new-quite- a yellow spider “marbleized” by sinuous Her paintings are also available in the geometric color construction paintings to red swirls. Both spider and heart are set like year-round Salon Exhibition at Monserrat her more familiar energetic gestural ecriture a medallion against a vibrant blue ground Contemporary Art, 547 West 27th St. 22 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 Continued from page 21 the mucus of installation, and video, and became a the man blessed presence in the global contemporary –– or cursed –– arena.” with five lingams A little over two decades earlier Bhupen runs rampant! Khakhar, a member of the Second The Generation, and the first openly gay resemblance Indian artist, expressed a contrastingly of this Indian postmodern attitude, when he stated that artist’s imagery “All revolutions in painting come about to that of the by change in subject matter.” Italian Neo- In a critical text on him, Karin Expressionist Zitzewitz, a critic and assistant professor was so striking of Art History and Visual Culture at that I turned Michigan State University writes: “This right to that brash and even inaccurate statement once snobbishly speaks well, however, for Khakhar’s scorned, own work, in which formal change was but by now often driven by the desire to represent indispensable something new. He pushed at the resource (even boundaries of appropriate subjects for for a confirmed painting, whether by celebrating the bibliophile on questionable taste of the middle class or deadline, still representing gay men making love.” stubbornly Aside from its explicitly homosexual holding out content, what most immediately struck against Kindle), me about Khakhar’s work was how Google, and similar it was to that of the Italian typed in: born contemporary art star Francesco “clemente and Bhupen Khakhar, Untitled, 1984, watercolor on paper. Peabody Essex Clemente, not only in his fluid, vibrantly khakhar: who Museum, gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection. brilliant manner of depicting faux- influenced © The Estate of Bhupen Khakhar. Image courtesy Peabody Essex primitive figures in watercolor, but in whom?” Museum, photograph by Walter Silver. his fondness for imagining anatomical The first contemporary...” anomalies. One 1984 painting by thing that came up was a monograph by But if anyone needed further proof, Khakhar, believed to have been inspired by Salman Rushdie called “Being Francesco it was there “for all to see” on another outlandish rumors of a man giving birth Clemente.” In reference to Clemente’s Google entry about a 2013 memorial to twins in Bangladesh depicts the guy self-portraits, I found the sentence I was group exhibition called “Touched by with two fetuses visible through a kind of looking for: “Set these portraits beside Bhupen,” at the Goethe Institute, in porthole in his bulging belly. He reclines the work of a major contemporary Germany, in which Clemente himself –– on a cot while a worried-looking midwife Indian artist such as Bhupen Khakhar who, as it happens, owns property in India wearing sunglasses and a shawl, crouches and the echoes are clear for all to see.” and spends considerable time there –– was beside him, as village life unfolds under Rushdie goes on to briefly describe how the only Western artist among several tall palm trees in a nearby window. Khakhar evolved a uniquely colloquial Indian participants, and acknowledges Another large watercolor, “An Old contemporary “voice” that was “imitative Kakhar as “a major influence.” Man from Vasad Who Had Five Penises neither of the West nor of traditional Since Clemente did the right thing, I Suffered from a Runny Nose,” depicts Indian miniature-style painting.” Then, will refrain from dubbing him “The Italian the naked, splay-legged subject with the as if suddenly remembering that he was Bhupen Kakhar.” five organ sprouting from his groin like supposed to be acting as an expensive a bunch of bananas or Lord Krishna’s hired gun for the trendy Gagosian extra arms, as he raises a hand to wipe Gallery, the writer changes direction his dripping nose. This picture is said almost in mid-sentence and launches Saffronart, Summer Online Auction, to parody a belief that yoga methods of into a rhapsodic and eloquent soliloquy June 18 - 19, 2014 The Fuller Building, self-control enable men to “contain the all about how Clemente “likewise takes 595 Madison Ave, Suite 900, saffronart.com vital substance of semen.” Meanwhile, inspiration from –– seeks the eternal in the

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JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO 23 A Winning Streak of Solos at Artifact here goes the neighborhood, as we used its cropped composition influenced by the suggest machines of war and torture. Having Tto say back in the day on the Lower psychological tensions of cinematic framing. survived both the fascist and communist East Side .. It’s still weird to see galleries As much as on his ability to illuminate regimes in Hungary, Dallos transforms on Orchard Street, where my mother used his models’ personalities, Berkowitz’s trauma into triumph in his “Struggle” series: to take my little sister Maureen and me paintings rely for their appeal on the elegant A simplified tower resembles a Paul Klee shopping for Easter outfits every year when insouciance of the sketchy pencil lines he fairytale castle –– except for wavy lengths of we were kids. One of the most venturesome allows to show through the semi-translucent wire spouting from a pair faucet-spouts on its and varied, judging from recent upcoming diluted oil glazes that drip like rivulets of roof, like flames from a two-headed dragon. exhibitions, is a relatively new venue, Artifact, watercolor down Allison’s purple dress, in his Another piece suggests a pasta machine, with at 84 Orchard Street. double portrait “Allison and Mark.” wire spilling out like human entrails. Several The photographs of Ciara Duffy, raised What Fernando Botero did for Colombia, other pieces appear wired to detonate. Watch in an Irish Catholic family, time-warped Camille Fox does for Egypt, where she was out! me right back to when they made me go born. She only lived there until the age of six, “Art is the language of human spirit, to confession at Saint Mary’s, just a couple before her parents moved the family to Israel the rhythm, beat and song of the self,” blocks away on Grand Street –– even and, later, to Australia. But she was obviously Ruth Gilmore Langs states of her rugged, though, like the artist herself (who is said, in a prodigy of social observation, judging muscularly brushed, yet lyrical paintings, the gallery literature, to have been “deeply from her narrative paintings, based on an which are indeed as close as visual art gets instilled with the notion of original sin and imaginative amalgam of early childhood to sheer musicality. The painting in oil and Catholic guilt”), I was too young to have sins memories and Scheherazade-type stories of a gold leaf on canvas that she calls “Alligator worth confessing. gilded age long before her time. In Fox’s oil Reef # 2” is one of her most buoyant. For Two related black and white images by on canvas “The Courtship,” a mature man rather than employing gold leaf as a discrete Duffy were stacked in a kind of vertical frieze. with a handlebar mustache, sporting a red element of the composition, as in a Byzantine The top one focused on the back of a person fez, white suit, and two-tone shoes, glances icon, Langs mixes the metallic matter right in indeterminate gender, reclining on a table sideways at a prim woman in a green dress into her oil pigments, to give her light-filled with its buttocks covered as though waiting perched stiffly beside him on a pink loveseat yellows, reds, pinks, blues, and greens ever for a massage. The bottom image was of a balancing a gift-wrapped present on her lap. more radiance and sparkle and increase the male torso in a loincloth that reminded me “The Start of Racing Season,”depicts another effervescence of her ebullient bubbling forms. of the one poor bleeding Jesus wore on the gent in a fez, grinning broadly in a crowd of In a manner reminiscent of yet quite cross in the most grisly statue in the veritable several glamourous ladies of the privileged different in intent from those Zen buddhist Grand Guignol opera of dread that the High class, some taking snapshots, their elaborate ink painters who employ the circle as a Mass was for me as a kid. Only, here, one wide-brimmed chapeaux adorned with symbol of either “emptiness” or “Eternity” of the man’s hands was stroking near the feathers or flowers. (or both!), the Swiss painter and art therapist obvious bulge in its classical folds. Camille Fox’s nostalgic pictures are Joachim Oettli employs a large letter “O” as Ciara Duffy had better watch herself, I deliberately whimsical and more than a little the central motif of his recent mixed media thought, or she could end up as famous and ironic, juxtaposed with headlines of Egypt works in acrylic and lacquer. In “O’ Chaos,” damned as Robert Mapplethorpe! today. and “O’ Connection,” it is employed in the Another artist at Artifact, Jack Berkowitz The childhood memories of Hungarian- exclamatory manner that a poet might use showed portraits and double portraits that born Peter Dallos, a noted neuroscientist and to begin a sentence in an ode. In “Wheel he calls “Pairings.” Like Elizabeth Peyton, widely exhibited sculptor, are welded within ‘O Fortune 1,” however, the large letter, Berkowitz is a painter of nuance rather than surreal steel shapes from which sinuous wires its inner circumference filled with rainbow- bombast. But unlike Peyton, he doesn’t unwind like tentacles or radiate like sinister radiant painterly gestures and drips — one of specialize in pretty people. The beauty he’s electronic waves. the most intriguing work in the series — is after has more to do with painterly finesse; As an adolescent in Budapest, Dallos harmoniously integrated with a photographic with what deKooning once referred to as studied art under the renowned painter image of a forest. Ah, wilderness! “slippery glimpses,” and a certain fluidity György Kadar, then learned the practical –– Ed McCormack of the brush –– especially when Berkowitz trade of tool and die making, which he substitutes the smoother surface of banner would later apply to creating abstract mixed Artists reviewed were recently seen at Artifact, cloth for canvas in some of his larger media metal sculptures, some of which are 84 Orchard Street, btw Broome and Grand paintings, such as the pairing of an older and in the permanent collection of the American Artifactnyc.net younger man titled “Frank and John,” with Holocaust Memorial Museum, that often

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June 10 - July 1, 2014 Reception: Thursday June 12, 2014 6-8 pm New York City 2014: Synchronicity Célia Bai Lambert | Doug Bootes | Hein van Houten Navah Porat | Marcio Pilot

(from top to bottom) Navah Porat Waiting Woman with a Bag Oil on Canvas 23.5” x 16” Chris Langley Two Umbrellas Mixed Media on Canvas 23” x 16” Véronique Vallet Pommes en Suspens, Grandes Arabesques 1 Oil on Canvas 15.5” x 31.5” Adam Kiger Piece #93 (Eventually) Acrylic & Charcoal on Canvas 36” x 48”

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2014 GALLERY&STUDIO Dorothy A. Culpepper Diversity in Process

“Skydiving Above Blue” 24"x30"

July 8 - 26, 2014 Reception: Thursday, July 10, 6 - 8 pm VV MONTSERRAT

CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY 547 WEST 27TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10001 212.268.0026 [email protected]