JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 10 NO. 5 New York GALLERY&STUDIO

FANCY DELANCEY STARBUCKS BOHEMIA

The New Museum and the New Lower East Side Gallery Scene

by Ed McCormack

Cover photo by Antonio Huerta ” Dry Tears “

On View May 14 - July 11, 2008 www.huc.edu/museums/ny

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE –JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION MUSEUM ,usvhv hgsnk iufn – 'dkue iuhbuh urchv Brookdale Center, One West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012-1186 Rosalyn A. Rosalyn A. Engelman: Joe Chierchio “Barber Shop” Colored Pencils 16" x 20" Colored Pencils “Barber Shop” Sept. 9 - Oct. 4, 2008 GALLERY OF GRAPHIC ARTS, LTD 1601 York Ave. New York, N.Y. 10028 212-988-4731 Tues-Sat 11-6:30 www.joechierchio.com [email protected]

GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008

G&S Highlights

On the Cover: Art, real estate and historical Joe Chierchio, pg. 31 self-consciousness animate the living Hendrik Smit, pg. 25 diorama that is the booming new Lower East Side gallery scene. A native son reports. (centerfold)

Dorothy A. Culpepper, pg. 4

Joseph DiPiazza, pg. 8

Elizabeth Delson pg. 27 Anne Kolin, pg. 7 Wayne Thiebaud pg. 10 A.B. Bradshaw, pg. 28 Rosalyn A. Engelman, Alphonse Lane, pg. 6 pg. 26

Kenneth Dinkel, Jane Stanfel, pg. 11 pg. 29

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2 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Stacey Clarfield Newman: Courage and Transformation rt is not therapy and art can save unconscious attraction towards the light. somewhat incongruously over an area of Anobody. This is a hard truth known by The purification of the soul by fire, repre- bare white paper, perhaps signifying how the all artists who have been faced with devas- sented in Romanesque art by the burning ever changing cycles of life mirror those of tating life challenges. Yet it is also inarguable ember placed by the angel in the prophet’s the seasons. that art, in times of suffering, can provide mouth, is visually portrayed on a small Indeed Newman maintains that her cho- consolation and spiritual succor for those Mattei urn by means of an image of Love sen medium, collage “is like life in its layer- who create it, as well as for those who are holding a butterfly close to the flame. The ing of reality and fantasy, trials and success- receptive to it. Angel of Death was represented by the es.” And her own process, which she refers For this reason, over the years, along Gnostics as a winged foot crushing a butter- to as “painting with paper” (since she with gaining critical begins by hand painting acclaim for her gallery the papers that she cuts exhibitions, Stacey or tears, to assemble her Clarfield Newman has compositions) is more devoted considerable layered than most. Often time and energy to cre- it involves layering trac- ating murals for hospi- ing paper, tissue, rice tals and AIDS outpa- paper, and watercolor tient facilities––places paper of different where people come face weights and densities to to face with mortality create contrasts between and the spirit is tested. opacity and translucency, Over the past four the complexity further years, since her last enhanced by photo exhibition in Chelsea, transfer and drawn Newman herself has imagery that adds an been tested by life- evocative symbolic ele- threatening illness and a ment to the overall succession of family abstract thrust of her crises which are reflect- compositions. ed, however obliquely, Newman’s use of in her new solo show at such imagery is especial- Viridian Artists, 530 ly affecting in “Breast West 25th Street, from Plate,” which refers June 3 through 28, directly to her bout with with an artist’s recep- breast cancer and inte- tion on Thursday, June grates photo transfers of 5th from 6 to 8 pm and mammeries, a woman a collector’s reception with upraised arms, and on Saturday June 21, other significant symbols from 3 to 6 pm. The with bold abstract col- title of the exhibition “Breast Plate, 2008” lage areas akin to “Naked on the Wall” speaks to the level of fly, from which we may deduce that the but- Abstract Expressionist brush strokes. Here, candor and vulnerability that makes terfly was equated with life rather than the too, the irregular shape of the composition Newman’s latest series of mixed media and soul in the sense of the spirit or transcen- and its expansive sense of scale in relation to collage paintings among the most powerful dent being. This also explains why psycho- the body of the viewer (akin to how an X- and compelling of her career. analysis regards the butterfly as a symbol of ray screen conforms to the proportions of “I felt like Rip Van Winkle, waking after a rebirth.” the human torso, an effect heightened by long sleep,” Newman said during a recent With this in mind, the symbol of the but- the photo-negative quality of the imagery), phone conversation, speaking of how eager terfly seems more of a grace-note than ever, along with the suggestiveness of the title, she had been to get back to work after as it flutters through recent collages by provoke an unusual sense of visceral empa- recovering from her surgeries. “I remember Newman, such as “Aftermath.” In this long thy, when one comes into close physical being in a parking lot in the rain; people all horizontal piece, its format suggesting a proximity to the collage. around me were complaining about the Chinese hand-scroll, the red floral forms Other collages, such as “Inner Piece” weather, and here I was looking up at at the flaring out at the center of the composition (pun obviously intended to skirt cliché and sky, feeling just so grateful to be alive...” take on a visceral quality that the artist con- emphasize formal intention) and “Vagabond Even before she took seriously ill, firms. While making clear that they were not Blues,” are idyllic abstract landscapes, the Newman’s collages were life-affirming in a deliberately contrived to represent anything former depicting an imaginary realm of pri- manner that set them apart from much so specific, Newman states that these fiery vate solace, the latter celebrating the restless other contemporary art. Now, the timeless red forms now remind her of how her body joy of having a new lease on life. symbol of the butterfly, long ubiquitous in “was literally torn open” by the trauma of Like all of Stacey Clarfield Newman’s her compositions and continuing as a her medical ordeals. recent works, these are the profoundly prominent feature of her new work, is espe- At the top left of the composition, a radi- inspiring personal testaments of a highly tal- cially resonant in light of her recent experi- ant bird hovers uncertainly, as though hav- ented artist who has walked through fire ences. ing lost its way, while at the lower right a and emerged whole to tell the tale. In “A Dictionary of Symbols,” J.E. Cirlot large butterfly flutters close to the blood- tells us that among the ancients, the butter- red, flame-like fronds. Nearby, sharper ––Ed McCormack fly was “an emblem of the soul and of the forms, resembling autumn leaves, float

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 3 Dorothy A. Culpepper: Painting in Maximum Overdrive

ontext, in (Reception: Ccontemporary Thursday, July painting, can 17, from 6 to often appear to be 8 PM.) everything. When One of the we understand ways that that a certain Culpepper keeps mode of expres- her work fresh is sion has been his- by continually torically validated, employing new those who contin- techniques for ue or extend its manipulating pig- tradition can be ment by pouring readily absorbed and dripping and into the critical other means, to dialogue. keep the surface However, the of the work active danger in such a and alive. The simplistic system title of her new of aesthetic assim- show indicates ilation was point- the degree of ed out by risk-taking that Kandinsky, the makes her work a father of “pure kind of high-wire composition,” as act, predicated on he referred to it, spontaneous as early as 1912, processes of paint when he wrote, handling and split “The artist must second decision train not only his making. eye but his soul, “My work is a so that it can never ending weigh colors in its challenge in own scale and design, color and thus become a finding a way to determinant in paint that is total- artistic creation. If ly me,” she has we begin to break stated. “I want to the bonds that feel free as I bind us to nature express myself and to devote through paint, ourselves purely found objects and to the combina- shapes of color tion of pure color and canvas. As and independent my work matures, form we shall pro- I realize that the duce works that “Discompose” history of art has are mere geomet- spirit’ that then take place are either per- helped my paint- ric decoration, resembling something like sonal, in that they affect some kind of ings and monoprints to evolve into maxi- a necktie or a carpet....” mental integration, or perhaps supra-per- mum overdrive. Painting to the max is Commenting on the great abstract pio- sonal, in that they assume the archetypal what I want to do.” neer’s warning that “Beauty of form and patterns into which mankind projects an One of the more prevalent techniques color is no sufficient aim by itself,” and explanation of its destiny.” that Culpepper appears to be exploring in his invocation of the soul, the distin- Although abstract painting has been her new paintings is working “wet-into- guished critic and historian Herbert Read declared dead and been reborn numerous wet,” with different colors melting into asserts in A Concise History of Modern times in the intervening decades, it still one another and slightly blurring to pro- Painting, “We are nowadays a little shy of provides an avenue for profound revela- duce a kind of fuzzily mottled effect that using the word ‘soul,’ or phrases like tions for an artist such as Dorothy A. we see especially in a work such as the ‘vibrations of the spirit,’ but it is not diffi- Culpepper, who has kept her faith in large acrylic on canvas “La Plata cult to substitute the terminology of the “pure composition” through all the Blizzard.” Here, the interaction of deep psychology that has developed since recent permutations of postmodernism, blue hues swirling in a linear manner and 1912, and then we see that the point and continues to surprise one with the white splotches that spread along their Kandinsky was making is obvious enough: vitality of her discoveries in her new solo veiny configurations like blossoms on a the work of art must evoke a response on exhibition, “Expression on the Edge,” at tree occupying the center of the composi- a deeper level, the level we now call Montserrat Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, tion is particularly dynamic. As always in unconscious; and the ‘vibrations of the from July 8 through August 2. Culpepper’s compositions, subsidiary hues 4 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 such as green, yellow, and red play along the edges and enliven the interior of the dominant forms, adding structural and chromatic complexity to the highly active surface. A deliberate sense of drama inevitably imparts grandeur to Culpepper’s composi- tions. She never hesitates to push the envelope, as seen in another major acrylic on canvas called “Orckid”––its title seem- ing an intriguing, if somewhat obscure, anthropomorphic / floral pun––where rivulets of poured and blurred “wet-into- wet” white, yellow, and fleshy pink hues flow in several directions simultaneously, creating a vertiginous sense of instabili- ty––as though the composition is in the process of reorganizing itself before our very eyes. The risk that Culpepper takes in a work such as this is that the painting could almost appear to be running away with her. Yet she miraculously reins in the composition through the roughly symmetrical dispersal of white blotches that counterbalance the underlying lava- like intermingling of pink and yellow hues, as well as stabilizing the dissolving black rivulets that run horizontally across the composition like a blurred photo- image of bare, gnarled, windblown tree- limbs. Such last-minute feats of formal “rescue” in the midst of apparent chaos occur frequently in Culpepper’s paintings and are invariably exhilarating for their sheer boldness—as when the hero in old silent film rides up on a galloping horse and plucks a child like a flower from the railroad tracks just in the nick of time! Orckid” Although its title might suggest an entire spectrum, “Peacock” is in fact one of Culpepper’s most coloristically restrained canvases, composed mainly with a veritable fireworks of white graffiti- like lines scrawled over loosely applied areas of verdant green and sunny yellow, darkened in places by grayish washes like those in Chinese ink paintings. Yet for all its chromatic restraint, this is one of Culpepper’s boldest large canvases for the untrammeled vigor of her splashy white ecriture. Here, as well as in “Discompose” “Verve,” “Agitate,” and “Zoom,” busier —more highly colored and densely worked recent paintings that hark back to an earlier mode— Culpepper displays her remarkable ability to dance perpetually out on “the edge,” to use her own term, and by doing so to fulfill her stated aim of “painting to the max” and being “totally me.” And if one is not mistaken, that seems close to being what Kandinsky had in mind when he spoke of training not only the eye but the soul. ––Peter Wiley “Verve”

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 5 Rosalyn A. Engelman: “Dry Tears” for Our Floundering Species ormalist and humanist concerns have long gestural immediacy akin to Abstract aesthetic pleasure they provide almost impli- Fbeen at odds in American art—at least Expressionism to the service of social cates us in the horrors they describe. How since the late 1930s, when modernism activism, in paintings such as “Babi Yar: dare we take such delectation from the juicy became fully established as an international Korelich, 2007-2008,” named for the reds and greens of “Sudan, 2007-2008,” movement and challenged the social realism famous poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko knowing full well that the government of that flourished during the Depression. (from which the exhibition title, “Dry that troubled land started the first genocide Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic Tears,” also derives) memorializing the 33, of the 21st century and that the mass mur- of the postwar years, argued for a pure plastic 771 Jews massacred by the Nazis in Kiev on der and taking of slaves still continues? Part art, an art of “absolutes,” devoid of literary two days in September of 1941. of the power of Engelman’s paintings is content, which he termed “kitsch,’ while Consisting primarily of two horizontal how they almost appear to critique them- Selden Rodman, a more marginalized but no bars set against a monochromatic color field, selves by virtue of a sensuousness that verges less vehement voice, championed artists “who this painting is as compositionally austere as on hedonism. Yet she also seems to be feel drawn to values outside themselves any Rothko. However, its thickly pigmented telling us that beauty is its own justification, enough to examine them in their work.” surface, encrusted with variegated red hues, something we can’t live without, at risk of And while the more permissive climate of has an altogether more visceral impact, like a putting our souls and the world itself in postmodernism may have muted the con- landscape of clotted blood intersected by even greater peril. troversy, we still tend to make sharp distinc- clouds of smoke and glimmers of golden Although Engelman’s new paintings tions between “art for art’s twilight. Other new paintings also couch function independently as autonomous art sake” and art that address- objects, they are seen here es moral and social issues. in the context of a dramatic Thus one of the season’s installation that also includes more unusual, not to men- life-size plastic figures. tion powerful, exhibitions Apparently made from is Rosalyn A. Engelman: clothing mannequins that “Dry Tears,” on view at the artist has painted and Hebrew Union College – studded like Saint Sebastian Jewish Institute of Religion with large nails, these figures Museum, Brookdale have a presence as haunting, Center, One West 4th as mutely eerie, as the cast Street, through July 11. plaster people of George “My aim is to create art, Segal. Only, they are more but also to reach hearts horrific for being garishly and minds by way of indi- smeared with read acrylic vidual memory, emotion, paint that gives them an and experience,” says appearance suggesting the Engelman, whose work charred flesh of the has been exhibited over Hiroshima bombing vic- the years in many presti- tims. gious international venues “Collateral Baby H, and, most recently, at the 2007-2008,” occupies its Biennale de Firenze, Italy. pedestal like a morgue-slab, For an artist active in an horizontally, wearing a neck- age awash in irony, when lace of barbed wire, swathed honest passion can often in strips of gauze. appear to be the last taboo, “Collateral Damage–Soldier, this amounts to a radical 2007-2008,” stands position, the genesis of upright, with only a shred- which Engelman explains ded army fatigue jacket cov- by saying, “My life and sen- “Babi Yar: Korelich, 2007-2008” ering her nakedness, blood- sibility have been greatly influenced by violent themes in strong formal terms. red tears streaming from blind eyes. In Jewish concerns. As a child, the atrocities of “Gettysburg, 2007-2008” evokes its subject “Three Graces, 2007-2008,” the installa- World War II were deeply ingrained upon with two diagonal stripes, from which tion’s overpowering centerpiece, the paint- my psyche and inner vision. Graphic news- inverted red drips rise like flames, set against smeared, nail-studded female mannequins, reels and worries about family were part of a tactile green field, suggesting the verdant draped in black shrouds and shackled to one my earliest consciousness. My father emi- landscape on which the biggest battle ever another by slave-chains, stand amid scat- grated from Warsaw, Poland, and lost many fought on American soil took place. tered newspaper and magazine clippings family members, as did my mother, who left In “Machines of War, 2007-2008,” bearing lurid photos and headlines about Russia after the Russian Revolution.” Engelman employs darker hues and turbu- the rape, torture, and disfigurement of Unlike Ben Shahn and Leonard Baskin, lent, muscular strokes, bracketed within an women in Nazi Germany, Afghanistan, earlier Jewish artists of conscience who were even more severe geometric format, to con- Rwanda, and elsewhere worldwide. similarly moved by their own experience to vey the relentless, pitiless power of evil run- As long as such atrocities continue to embody a broad range of universal suffering ning on automatic pilot. Even here, howev- exist, Rosalyn A. Engelman seems to be in symbolic figurative styles, Engelman does er, the paint surface is so seductive that we telling us, we are all culpable. And we are all not position herself in opposition to main- relish it for its sheer succulence. victims of our own moral poverty. stream modernist aesthetics. Rather, she Indeed, one of the most paradoxical puts vibrant color, sensuous tactility, and a aspects of Engelman’s paintings is that the ––Ed McCormack

6 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Gestural Immediacy and Symbolic Impact in the Art of Anne Kolin he cross is a complex symbol, usually what one poet friend of the artist referred to useful word; a hard-won beauty wholly of Tassociated with Christianity; yet it has as “painful wounds buried deep in the her own making, born not of the desire to meanings beyond that of the crucifixion and memory.” These means include collaged be decorative or otherwise engaging but out the concept of “suffering upon the cross.” It fabrics and surgically suggestive stitches that of the struggle that Hans Hofmann once can also suggest a “cross-roads,” or those blend with seamless cohesiveness into the referred to as “push and pull,” by which for- junctures in our journey through life at palpable pigmentations of her surfaces, lend- mal tensions are established that energize which one must decide to choose one direc- ing her canvases an epidermal allusiveness gestural painting. tion or another. Kolin also And, of course has natural, the phrase, almost alchem- “We all have ical ability to our own cross imbue unlikely to bear” tran- forms and raw scends theolog- materials with ical specifics, unaccustomed having come grace and har- into common mony. Add to usage as a term this her for the unique remarkable tal- challenges that ent for twisting each individual and turning must face. familiar sym- It is these bols, such as more “secular” her ubiquitous and universal crosses, into meanings, configurations rather than the that give them obvious reli- new expressive gious ones, life, and per- that the French haps you will artist Anne have some idea Kolin prefers to of what makes explore in her paintings paintings such so compelling. as those in her To put it first New York “Yellow Cross” quite simply, exhibition there is a “Cross Stitch and Suture,” at Noho Gallery, which can often evoke visceral empathy in refreshing immediacy to her work which 530 West 25th Street, from June 10 the viewer. recalls the excitement of one’s earliest through July 5. (Reception: Saturday, June Yet above and beyond their tactile attrac- encounters with so-called “Action 14, from 4 to 6 PM.) tions, it is the gestural sweep of Anne Painting,” albeit enriched in her case by par- Influenced by both the gestural energy of Kolin’s compositions which initially arrests ticular qualities of finesse and tactile delecta- the Abstract Expressionists and the palpable our attention by virtue of its rhythmic force. tion that also hark back to Tachisme and material qualities in the work of the Catalan One gets swept up in the sheer velocity of L’Art Informel, European counterparts to painter Antoni Tapies, Kolin combines vig- her brush work; the bold scale of her forms, Abstract Expressionism informed by School orous paint handling with sewn fabrics in which fill her large canvases like forces of of Paris lushness and coloristic refinement her recent compositions, the genesis of nature; the smoky resonance of her color that heightened rather than diminished their which was a period from 1998 to 2000 areas, with brilliant red and yellow hues impact. when she conducted art workshops in seeming to burn through gritty gray expans- The French critic Michel Tapie (not to Strasbourg Prison in her native France. es that appear to splash and crash with be confused with the aforementioned The experience of working with prisoners oceanic expansiveness. Catalan painter Antoni Tapies) who was the had a profound effect on Kolin’s work in “Ever since the academicians associated main spokesman and theorist for Tachisme general, but most particularly on a series of beauty with that which is respectable and once wrote, “Today, art must stupefy to be collages created with torn posters in the unchallenging, artists have hesitated to use art...the true creators know that the only manner of Arte Povera, in which the motif the word,” the American painter and critic way for them to express the inevitability of of prison bars was a prominent element. Fairfield Porter once stated in an essay called their message is through the extraordi- Faces with a crude power reminiscent of Art “Kinds of Beauty.” And while it is true that nary––paroxysm, magic, total ecstasy.” Brut and the sophisticated faux primitivism I do not remember Anne Kolin using that Despite the overblown rhetoric, which of Karel Appel were also a feature of those word even once over the course of a couple sounds somewhat dated today, Tapie could earlier works. of hours that we spent looking at and dis- be speaking of Anne Kolin’s “Cross Stitch However, aside from the cross which cussing her work, her paintings nonetheless and Suture” series. For her gestural immedi- appears in various permutations, Kolin’s possess a kind of beauty. acy provides an exhilarating antidote to the most recent collage paintings are completely It is a rough, blunt beauty, unfacile and timid strategizing which has become all too abstract, without recognizable referents. completely devoid of banality or any of the familiar in much contemporary painting. Rather, she prefers to employ painterly and other negative connotations that have textural means alone to evoke a sense of recently attached themselves to that once ––Ed McCormack

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 7 Encountering Joseph Di Piazza’s “Quantum Collection” he statements that artists issue in con- blend and feather down colors.” Close. Tnection with their work can often be as Apparently, the creative process for Di It is the Quantum Collection, however, telling as the work itself. This can be espe- Piazza begins with a kind of intuitive 3-D for which Di Piazza has the highest hopes, cially true of those isolated visionaries, com- “Rorschach” approach that the artist seeing it as the artistic expression of what monly referred to as “Outsider artists,” describes as follows: “After finding and Charles Kwiatkowski (a former trouble who, like Henry Darger, often inhabit imag- choosing a suitable piece of old eroded, shooter for the phone company who likens inary worlds of their own making, or, like country driftwood, I orientate it around try- the complexity of Di Piazza’s thought to Joseph Di Piazza, an artist represented by that of Albert Einstein and takes it upon Monserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 himself to translate it into terms a layman West 27th Street, proceed from a theoretical can understand) defines as “religion and sci- mindset that diverges from the accepted ence coming together when metaphysics norm. meets quantum physics.” For the past couple of years, Di Piazza, a The shapes that Di Pizza divines in found former merchant marine who, besides being fragments of driftwood and proceeds to a visual artist is the author of a self-styled refine and make figuratively manifest invari- “scientific metaphysics and philosophical ably depict fauna and flora, simplified in a religious work in progress called semi abstract style and enlivened by vibrant Terminations in Space,” has bombarded this hues that take on a glossy, almost glass-like writer via mail and email with texts about a translucence, due to the many coats of latex series of sculptures that he calls “The primer, spray enamel and transparent paint Inevitable Quantum Collection,” in that he applies to their surfaces. Indeed, progress for two decades, gradually win- works such as “Bottom Fish,” where the nowed down from 150 to 74 pieces that he vibrant red fish glistens like a human heart, considers of “the utmost historical impor- set against brilliant green shoots of undersea tance.” foliage, and “Bird on a Branch,” where the Forwarded by his managing agent, diminutive avian figure and its rugged perch Charles Kwiatkowski, who appears so con- meld in a plethora of rainbow hues all of vinced of his client’s genius as to suggest such a radiance as to suggest Color Field that Di Piazza is a Don Quixote who has painting in three dimensions. In “Magpie,” found his Sancho Panza, these missives have in particular, Di Piazza’s use of color parti- all the urgency of breaking news dispatches, cles applied with a spray gun displays a chro- as they update one on such historical facts as matic intensity, coupled with a tonal subtle- that the collection was recently moved to a ty, that compares favorably to the acrylic storage facility in New Jersey where paintings of Jules Olitski. “They’re kept in a climate controlled self Taken in purely formal terms, his pieces storage unit, each piece standing freely in also have a streamlined, Brancusi-like sim- boxes. The pieces are spaced apart from one plicity that also bespeaks a highly sophisti- another and remain in the dark and I closely cated grasp of volumes in space. Di Piazza, inspect the pieces periodically.” (In a sepa- however, is driven by concerns that go rate dispatch, the artist assures one, “In the beyond the formal into the realm of the fan- event that the work is more than a couple of tastic, as seen in “Forest Fire Angel,” where years ahead of its time, it will remain secure- the flare-winged form appears to rise ly at rest inside the storage facility until its Phoenix-like from the ashes in a burst of time.”) fiery brilliance. This piece seems a visual rel- “King Fisher” But what, exactly, is the Quantum ative of a prose poem called “The Standing Collection? In fact, it is a series of sculptures ing to envision a subject and/or a subject Dead,” in which with an eccentric, almost created from pieces of driftwood that Di composition that I can work with and is Blakean sense of prophecy, and lines such as Piazza has collected in Susquehanna, appealing. Then I prep the piece, add or “Torches of flame rained down” and “the Pennsylvania, and on the beach near his subtract to the piece by breaking it down, trees released their seeds before becoming home and studio in Keansburg, New Jersey. cutting it, carving it, or using wood-fill to the standing dead,” Di Piazza describes the If, on learning this, the reader immediately extend or fill in a particular piece in the rebirth of a forest thirty years after being thinks of the kind of kitsch driftwood sculp- appropriate manner...” devastated by infernal conflagration. ture that used to decorate beatnik espresso Along with the Quantum Collection, Di Here, as in sculptures such as “Baby dives in Greenwich Village and Venice West Piazza has recently embarked on a sub- Duck,” “Snail” “Sea Horse,” and “Eagle,” in the late 1950s, he or she can rest assured sidiary series called “Faces,” consisting of Joseph Di Piazza displays an intuitive talent that Di Piazza transforms the raw and rather larger than life charcoal and pastel “pressure for employing found natural forms to declasse natural materials by which his sculp- portraits,” which he begins by transferring unearth the underlying patterns in nature, tures are inspired and from which they are greatly enlarged photographs taken by his the eternal, repetitive, unifying rhythms that created through a laborious process of manager’s wife to drawing paper by pushing appear to validate the old cliché that there’s spraying and hand painting, the coatings carbon dust through pin-holes pricked “nothing new under the sun.” applied in numerous layers, enabling him to around their contours. The resulting And not even the most hyperbolic meta- confidently state, “Never before in history images, such as “Allie,” a portrait of Charles physical bluster can obscure the poignant has there been an art collection as beautiful Kwiatowski’s cute preteen daughter, her face power of Di Piazza’s recurring theme: small, and natural as the Quantum collection, filling the entire picture area, as she flashes a defenseless creatures clinging to the shelter mainly because one must consider the winning gap-toothed grin, have a deadpan of their endangered natural habitats for dear longevity of the combined materials used, as frontal presence akin, albeit in a more folksy life. well as the degree in which it’s possible to manner, to the early portraits of Chuck ––Ed McCormack 8 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Neil Masterman: A Maestro of Many Styles from the UK ny exhibition by the British autodidact depiction of the lumi- modern era has seen a ANeil Masterman could almost be nous blue water into rise in appreciation for described as a one-man group show, given which the yolk spills its the smaller picture that the broad range of styles and effects this vir- glittering reflections, as puts him right in the tuoso artist commands, several of which can well as the sober dark swing of things. be seen at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th rocks nearby. In Indeed, the unprepos- Street, from June 26 through July 17. “Sunset II” however, sessing size of his pic- (Reception: Thursday, June 26, from 6 to the entire composition tures makes them all 8pm.) comes alive with fiery the more remarkable Two of Masterman’s favorite quotes hues that show a kin- for how they command about painting, included in an address book ship to the Fauves. our attention through of his paintings that is a popular seller in By contrast, In other the boldness of their England, are “Painting is a journey into the paintings such as “My forms and their vibrant unknown” and “Painting is how you feel at Back Garden” and colors alone. the time.” Both seem to apply to his own “Kings Street Mish Paintings such as work, which is bright and upbeat in a man- Mash,” Masterman “Red Houses after Van ner akin to Hockney and Peter Blake, but works in a much more Gogh” and “Penny’s also shares a sense of playfulness with that subdued palette domi- Flowers,” a buoyant other British free spirit Colin Self. nated by earth colors garden scene that This is especially apparent in Masterman’s and shard-like shapes seems especially British, sunsets, painted on Caribbean holidays, that pay homage to “Caribbean Sunset” are particularly appeal- which combine an almost childlike exuber- Cubism without appear- ing in this regard. And ance with an innate visual sophistication. ing in the least bit derivative. Which is to although they may be somewhat anomalous Working in acrylic on paper, Masterman is say, he puts the geometric vocabulary of the in an oeuvre given overall to more represen- an uninhibited colorist, applying brilliant cubists to his own uses to capture his tational, albeit innovatively handled subjects, reds and yellows with what might appear to response to his immediate surroundings. abstractions such as “You Guess” and be abandon, if not for his marvelous instinct The results are unpretentious and intimate, “Troubles Gone” are lively and intriguing for chromatic harmonies. In “Caribbean the latter quality enhanced by his tendency explorations of pure form and color. But Sunset,” for example, the central orb to work on easel-scale. perhaps the biggest surprise of all is “Lips,” explodes like an egg tossed into a table fan, While the relatively modest scale of an especially small yet striking realist render- and its overall effect is as dynamic as Orphist Masterman’s pictures might have marginal- ing of a moistly glistening feminine mouth abstraction by Frank Kupka. Yet the compo- ized him a few short years ago, when British making a Monroe-like moue with the look sition is brought back down to earth by and American painters alike were under the of a Pop icon. Masterman’s somewhat more restrained sway of Abstract Expressionism, the post- ––Maureen Flynn New York in Black and White: A Modern Romance s any number film noir enthusiasts will city spoke just as eloquently, as seen in Rudy golden ringlets illuminated by sunlight, Aattest, New York City has always been Collins’s images of Harlem brownstones, showed that innocent wonderment was still especially gorgeous in black and white. Not their facades as stolid and dignified as the possible. to mention those art photography purists faces of old neighborhood churchgoing Jennifer Holst invariably takes an intimate who consider all color photography com- folks pondering their fate as rampant gentri- view in her small, tightly composed prints, mercial, period. So, you see, there was more fication changes the character of the area. here focusing up close on the tartan plaid than one good reason for “Made in New Deena Weintraub’s photographs captured kilts and socks of Scots marching on Fifth York: An Exhibition of Black and White the changing face of the Lower East Side Avenue with wittily abstract results. By con- Photography,” recently curated by Jean just as graphically, starting with a detail of trast, Scott Weingarten’s eye for raucous Prytyskacz for the West Side Arts Coalition, the stone columns and scrollwork of the spectacles comes across in his triptych of at Broadway Mall Community Center on Eldridge Street Synagogue and moving on bodacious celebrants at the Coney Island the center island at 96th Street and to the graffiti-splashed facade of a former Mermaid Parade, where scantily clad con- Broadway. Hebrew school that is now the Angel testants mug for the camera. Janice Wood Prejudices aside, however, the show justi- Orensanz Foundation. Wetzel, on the other hand, puts a lyrical fied itself in its own terms by the inclusion Curator Jean Prytyskacz focused on spin on the city in her idyllic image of row- of David Ruskin’s romantically misty silver another facet of the changing Lower East boats on the lake in Central Park with apart- gelatin print “A Walk in the Park,” its tiny side with her picture of Delancey Street ment buildings rising like fairytale castles silhouetted couple walking along a winding plastered with “Going Out of Business” over the lush treetops in the background. path reminding one of those scenes in the banners that struck an elegiac note, as they Laurens McKenzie also casts a romantic Hollywood classic “Portrait of Jenny,” when promised the bargains for which the neigh- spell with “A Walk Across Time,” her pic- Joseph Cotton’s paintings spring magically borhood was once famous for the very last ture of pedestrians on the Williamsburg to life. time. Bridge resembling a still from an old news- Opposite pleasures were afforded by The surreal incongruities of a city where reel. Eliud Martinez’s freaky Coney Island anything can happen were made manifest in And Carolyn Reus’s splendid portrait of a scenes, with the amusement park rides set Jane Hoffer’s pictures of a peacock preening baby snoozing in a stroller as serenely as eerily against turbulent El Greco skies and outside Saint John the Divine. And the faces Winston Churchill after a few stiff whiskies the cropped faces of the crowds all the way of a populace that has seen it all were attests to the born New Yorker’s ability to down at the bottom of the composition immortalized in Dan Gelb’s “City Candid” adopt to the constant cacophony of one of leering like James Ensor gargoyles. random portraits––among which one image the world’s noisiest cities. In other pictures the architecture of the of a cherubic child watching a parade, his ––Maurice Taplinger

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 9 Lynda Howitt Forges a New Language For Sea and Sky rowing up on the beach in Geraldton, stated. “Art is transformal in itself. It can show is the only Pop thing about it; for GAustralia, gave the painter Lynda change how you feel. It takes us into our Howitt is an artist much more in the tradi- Howitt a lifelong love of the ocean, which is inner world, the world of vision and feeling, tion of Abstract Expressionism and Color reflected in her solo exhibition of oils on it’s a journey inward.” Field painting, judging from the sense of canvas “Wind Beneath My Wings,” at Jadite The title of the present exhibition derives, chromatic nuance, subtle gesture, and above Galleries, 413 West 50th Street, from June in fact, from a hit song by Bette Midler, all, lyricism that makes her compositions so 17 through 28. (Reception: June 17, 6 to with phrases from its lyrics, such as “Did I exhilarating. There is an openness to them 8pm.) The show is well named, since that creates an extraordinary resonance, as Howitt’s take on vividly articulated though the painter were tuned into some watery expanses also has a stratospheric celestial symphony no one else can hear; feeling, a sense of airiness, weightlessness, perhaps emanating from that “inner and light that creates the visual equivalent world” of which she speaks. of a soaring sensation in the viewer. In any case, her paintings radiate a Horizontal streaks shot through with warmth that is quite compelling, even glimmers of light establish the main when executed in the cool values to which thrust of her compositions, which project she seems partial, perhaps in part due to a shimmering tonal radiance, even when the universal qualities of her subject mat- she works in a primarily monochromatic ter, but also because of her unique vision, palette of softly modulated gray or light in which opposite elements of nature are blue hues. In some paintings her feathery so successfully merged as to become a sin- strokes traverse the canvas at a fairly even gle entity melded in the medium of paint. keel, while in others they sweep upward, Howitt’s biography tells us, “Born in with frosty white highlights evoking the Uganda, the only white baby in a mission edges of clouds kissed by silvery illumina- hospital, Lynda fled the Idi Amin mas- “Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” tion. But they could just as easily suggest sacre with her family to the shores of curls of foam on the surface of a wave. Ever Tell You You’re My Hero?” and “I Western Australia.” And although it states in Indeed, sea and sky seem to intermingle Know the Truth” and “Fly, Fly, Fly High the next sentence that she had “an idyllic freely, becoming barely distinguishable, since Against the Sky,” serving as titles for indi- childhood” thereafter, such a tumultuous Howitt seems less interested in depicting vidual canvases. But the ramifications of the beginning suggests her deep gratitude for specific aspects of nature than in projecting a paintings go far beyond the banal senti- the ultimate peace and serenity that her sense of the emotions it provokes. ments of the romantic popular ballad for paintings convey so successfully to the “For me art is about what I feel,” she has which they are named. Thus, the title of the viewer. ––Byron Coleman Learning the Hard Way From Wayne Thiebaud “ s there an American face?” John Updike Thiebaud than I was of putting my wife’s As we walked Iasked in a short essay on our national beautiful young face and body on canvas any around Allan portraiture. Not surprisingly, he couldn’t way at all. Stone Gallery, come up with a conclusive answer. But if Still, I worked on that painting for several from one painting such a thing exists, no contemporary artist hours, while Jeannie went into a deep state to the other, it seems more equipped to paint it than Wayne of meditation and stayed so perfectly still occurred to me Thiebaud, a Californian who looks himself that our cat, Lulu, became mesmerized and that my attempted like a small town parson painted by Norman walked over to where she was sitting and portrait of Jeannie Rockwell and has always struck me as an actually stood up on her hind legs––some- could just as easily artist as American as, well, apple pie. thing I had never seen her or any other cat have been inspired In fact, the pies and cakes for which do before. The point, though, is that while by Thiebaud’s Thiebaud is best known have always seemed my painting captured something of a superfi- “Nude, 1963” or Nude, Back View, 1969” more like sinful portraits of terrible tempta- cial likeness, it came nowhere near being as “Girl with Mirror, tion than mere still-life subjects. And the much of a portrait of a particular person as 1965.” Both models even look as though paintings in the recent exhibition “Wayne this painting of a nude woman with her back they might be meditating; but that was just Thiebaud: The Figure,” at Allan Stone turned whom it is highly possible Thiebaud Jeannie’s way of sitting still for so long and Gallery, 113 East 90th Street, also had the hardly even knew. had nothing to do with me. What I was try- particular presence of portraits, even when Wayne Thiebaud’s ability to make person- ing for were those luscious rainbow shadows their faces were hidden from sight, as in the ality palpable in pigment, even when the and highlights that play along the edges of magnificent lifesize oil on canvas “Nude, model’s facial features cannot be discerned, is Thiebaud’s nude figures, lending their bare Back View, 1969.” equally clear in “Man Reading, 1963,” flesh and even their hair such sensual vitali- As we were looking at it in the gallery, my where the bullish body language of the ty––especially set against those thickly pig- wife reminded me of a nude portrait I had stocky man in the business suit, leaning for- mented, pure white backgrounds that he done of her way back when we were newly- ward in a chair with a book in his hands and favors. weds, which, although she was too tactful to his bald dome catching the light, tells every- I must have figured that the only way I say so, was frankly imitative of this one. thing one needs to know about him. Ditto could translate the beauty that I saw before While Thiebaud’s model is seen from for “Standing Man, 1964,” whose slight tilt me into a painting would be to shamelessly behind, standing, and I had posed Jeannie of the head to one side, as he confronts us in copy the way that Thiebaud did it. But I frontally, seated on a kitchen chair, it was his gray Brooks Brothers social armor and learned the hard way that, while that kind of obvious that I wanted my painting to look as shiny black brogans with his hands hanging magic can be imitated, it can never be emu- much as possible like his. Of course, I was at his sides, bespeaks the deadpan angst of a lated. no more capable of painting anything like shell-shocked soldier in the corporate wars. ––Ed McCormack 10 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Jane Stanfel Evokes the Silent Poetry of Forsaken Places here’s an elegiac quality to the paint- before his brother and he time-worn surfaces, her Tings of the Montana artist Jane Stanfel had separated, and he attention to details such as that can sometimes remind one of Andrew thought they might both cracks and stains lends Wyeth. This mood is especially prevalent in have the urge at the same these objects a haunting the series that Stanfel calls “Ghost Ranches time. Perhaps he planned poignancy. of Montana,” on view at Jadite Galleries, to marry someday.”) Yet it The subject of “The 413 West 50th Street, from June 3 through is the purely visual attrib- Sunday Car” is the partly 28. (Reception: June 3, 6 to 9pm.) utes of the wittily titled demolished chassis of a vin- An important difference between painting “Room for tage 1940s Ford partially Stanfel and the older artist, however, is that Friend” that finally com- submerged in a field of Stanfel’s style of realism is not nearly as mand our attention: the overgrown grass. Here, the finicky, and while her oils on canvas and old rugged geometric form of piece de resistance is the barn wood are filled with feeling for the the narrow A-frame struc- artist’s handling of its rust- abandoned ranches that she often chooses ture centrally placed in the ed surface, with much of as her subjects, the thrust of her work is composition; its ruddy col- the pale blue paint chipped never maudlin or merely nostalgic. Which is orations subtly harmonized away and even the rust tak- to say, her paintings have a formal rigor to with the luminous blue of ing on a sun-bleached “A Woman’s Life” match their emotional resonance, which the sky and the warm pinkish cast, the subtly should make them as appealing to fanciers umber earth; its formal thrust further harmonized colors yielding a sweetly for- of abstract and New Image painting as to enhanced by the detached outhouse door lorn chromatic beauty. those with an affection for the atmospheres scattered at a diagonal angle in the fore- Indeed, it is Jane Stanfel’s unique ability and mythology of the western states. ground. to find such beauty in unexpected places Stanfel has obviously studied the “back- Other paintings by Stanfel, such as “A and make it speak so eloquently of things story” of the historic sites and ramshackle Woman’s Life” and “The Sunday Car” are much more complex and universal than the structures that she paints, endowing them equally evocative. “A Woman’s Life” simple subjects that she chooses to paint with all the dignity of ancient Greek ruins. depicts a beat-up baby carriage leaning which has won her a following in Europe as Even a lowly subject such as an old out- against an old discarded washing machine well as the United States. She is a singular house, prompts intriguing ruminations in in front of one of the wooden walls that she artist with a gift for revealing the spirit of the texts that accompany her paintings always depicts so faithfully, right to the dis- forsaken places and the souls of discarded (“Why would a hermit such as Alfred build tinctly different grains of each individual objects. a two-seater outhouse? Perhaps it was built plank. As always, Stanfel’s treatment of ––Maurice Taplinger Nina Ozbey: Postmodern Abstraction Informed By a Sense of the Past side from such notable exceptions as Ozbey went the whole route, evolving in a matter AJoan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, few similar manner to the artists whose work she and woman artists were admitted into the boy’s emulates, builds upon and extends into the switching club that was the New York School nucleus postmodern era. For she began as painter of to oil, of the Abstract Expressionist movement at still life and landscape in watercolor, before the its inception in the late 1940s and early she eventually switched to oils, eliminated process 1950s. Not that worthy woman artists were subject matter, and took up her present ges- of paint- not plentiful; it’s just that the misogyny was tural mode. And like many of the best of ing such among male artists in the postwar years the Abstract Expressionists, though she gave became that they were pretty much ignored, except up subject matter, she retained the allusive- more as wives and girlfriends ––unless, as in the ness that lends her forms, laid down with a enjoy- case of Mitchell and Hartigan, their mastery welter of slashing strokes of color that she able. I of the supposedly masculine domain of so- layers and brings to vigorous gestural take called “action painting” made them impossi- crescendo, a sense of life and movement. pleasure “Tracks of Time” ble to dismiss. In canvases such as “Royal Flush,” in mak- There seems no doubt, however, that had “Tracks of Time,” and “Over the Ridge,” ing marks. These marks create spatial rela- the Oklahoma City painter Nina Ozbey, for example, Ozbey invests her compositions tionships by virtue of their color, weight, tex- who now lives and works in Earlysville, with a sense of natural phenomena and what ture, and value. My work is intuitive; begin- Virginia, been on the scene in New York the New York painter and critic Fairfield ning with one stroke of the brush, leading City at that time, her work would have Porter once termed “the immediacy of to another and another. I want the opportu- passed muster as well. Or at least that’s the experience.” Although, as their titles indi- nity to explore where the painting takes me impression one gets from previewing the cate, such paintings do not dwell in rather than where I take the painting.” work Ozbey will exhibit at Agora Gallery specifics, they appear beholden to emotions The raw, romantic energy inherent in her 530 West 25th Street, from July 22 through and events, and seem as if inhabited by muscular strokes, suggesting vestiges of August 12. (Reception: Thursday, July 24, 6 phantom presences, in much the same man- nature and human anatomy, hinting at a to 8pm.) ner as the paintings of such second genera- simultaneously reverent and rambunctious One can only speculate that the authen- tion New York School artists as Robert relationship with the great art of the past, ticity of Ozbey’s style has to do with the fact Goodnough and Alfred Leslie. makes Nina Ozbey seem a legitimate heir to that, rather than merely imitating the man- Like the good abstractionist that she is, the revolutionary movement that first put nerisms of those early New York School Ozbey speaks primarily in terms of form and American painting on the map. painters, as many others have done since, gesture, saying, “By letting go of subject ––Marie R. Pagano JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 11 Michael Gemmell: A Painter of “Anything Goes” in an Antic, the Bogs and the Irish Earth Frantic West Side Group Show ncountering the work of the Irish artist Michael Gemmell, one urated by participating artists Elton Tucker and Khuumba Ama Eis reminded of a poem by his famous fellow countryman Seamus Cfor the West Side Arts Coalition and seen recently at Broadway Heaney called “Exposure” that begins, “It is December in Wicklow: Mall Community Center on the center island at 96th Street and / Alders dripping, birches / Inheriting the last light, / the ash tree Broadway, “Anything Goes” billed itself as “A Craft Art / Mixed cold to look at.” Media Exhibit” and indeed demonstrated that the boundaries we For Gemmell lives and works in Wicklow and his paintings look at draw between those different categories are often arbitrary. the land with a similarly bleak and unforgiving beauty, judging from Georgianna Grantham, for example, showed fabric placemat the ones on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June designs that functioned superbly as geometric abstractions when art- 3 through 24. (Reception: Thursday, June 5, 6 to 8pm.) fully arranged in frames and hung on the gallery wall. Indeed, Dark, dark is Gemmell’s palette, given to earthy wintry browns, Grantham’s designs were now indistinguishable from fabric collages, not much green, some blues and whites with the aspect of old snow, demonstrating that in art context is often everything and can deter- frosty and shadowed. And when there are reds they, too, are dark, mine our perceptions of what is and what is not a work of art. deep, like the The same was true of Udeaku Chikezie’s handcrafted jewelry, blood of animals several pieces of which, exhibited dangling within an empty frame, on earth or snow. comprised an intriguing example of the art of assemblage. Again, It is as though the context, content, and intent conspired to confound our notions of landscape itself has what constitutes serious aesthetic expression. been transmogri- Barbara Eison White, on the other hand, left no doubt that she fied by an abstract was creating fine art, even when working in the folksy medium of language all colorful ceramic plaques. White’s still life “Fruit” and “African Gemmell’s own, Dream,” a detailed depiction of an African village in the manner of just as Heaney Red Grooms, were as compelling as her 3-D cut-out collage “Jazz,” makes it his own with musicians and sassy showgirls clad in strategically placed real in his poems. It is feathers evoking the heyday of Harlem’s famous The Cotton Club. a place shaded by Madi Lanier also jumped the boundaries between art and craft memory and with a monoprint called “Acrobats at the Beach” in a manner akin moody musings, to a more anatomically accurate Paul Klee, as well as a copper cutout “Fisherman’s Island III” possessed of a psy- of a willowy mermaid that was at once decorative and whimsical in chological climate perhaps even more prevalent than the weather, as the manner of Alexander Calder. And what could be more auda- seen in Gemmell’s oil on linen “The Wicklow Way,” where the big, ciously apt in the context of a show like this than Khuumba Ama’s squareish white and brown form occupies the center of the canvas hand crocheted designer shawl suspended from the wall draped over like a clenched fist. a crossbar like a Chinese scroll? Khuumba’s piece would succeed as a “My paintings are from above and below which connects with brash conceptual gesture alone, yet the beauty of the brown and the canvas and paint using mind and memory,” Gemmell states. “I pink fringed shawl gave it considerable visual appeal as minimalist have explored the Bogs, the Burren, and the Islands in most of my soft sculpture as well. work which intrigues me as the changes only take place at the Other exhibitors without craft connections took the relaxed spirit moment of one thought at one time, bringing an almost ancient of this show as an opportunity to show some of their more playful feeling of time and beauty.” experiments: Emily Rich played with layered panels in mixed media Notice that Gemmell never stops thinking about the landscape as pieces that lent her impressive gestural energy a new spatial dimen- something interiorized––“from above and below”—rather than as sion. Ivan Sherman revealed another, quite unexpected side of his of something diagrammatically delineating the lay of the land. His creative personality. Along with some of his technically wizardly process seems to be one of delving and digging into earthy essences, semi-abstract corrugated wall-sculptures of faces and semi-abstract as when Heaney likens working with his pen to the way his father architectural subjects combining the playful and the formal, sinks a spade “into gravelly ground.” Sherman showed digital prints on watercolor paper of expressively Thus one looks at his paintings from a different angle than most exaggerated jazz musicians. landscapes, inhabits them, actually, like a place where reality amounts Collage virtuoso Harriet Green, who invariably surprises one with to muted colors and strong forms. Sean Scully’s stripe paintings have her willingness to let each piece dictate its own terms, showed three a similarly weathered look, a kind of slightly sullied visual atmos- different approaches to her medium, ranging from the austere to the phere hinting at a kinship between the two painters. But Gemmell is antic. However, Green’s most compelling work this time out was a also taken by the raw variety of form, as well as the cold climate of collage painting with photographic images of dancers emerging color. The shapes in his paintings bear many submerged allusions, from a brightly painted house in a manner akin to Romare Bearden. “slippery glimpses” to use de Koonings famous term of things that Elton Tucker, a veritable maestro of excess known for his love of never come into specific focus but brood blockily with the enor- sparkles, seemed to take the title of the show he co-curated as a mous dark weight of imminence in compositions such as “Winter goad to outdo himself with a truly over-the- top composition called Island,” “Rebirth of a Field” and “Dreamer of Dreams.” “Music of Color.” Combining novelty store plastic mirrors with Again one thinks of Heaney; now of his poem “Bogland,” with Jackson Pollock dayglo spaghetti, this delightfully demented piece its “waterlogged trunks of great firs” and “the skeleton of the Great demonstrated Tucker’s rare talent for creating beauty from dime- Irish Elk” taken out of the peat and set up like “An astounding crate store detritus. full of air.” Encountering the paintings of Michael Gemmell, their Another less familiar funkmeister named Kenny Mathewson also forms pregnant with similar mysteries, their colors tinged by the dazzled us with a mixed piece called “Free the Angels” in which his timeless grime of excavated things, it is clear what the artist means manipulation of photographic fragments and raw painterly elements when he says, “My work speaks for itself and I feel it stands on its suggested a talent as raw, freewheeling, and monstrous as that of the own, as I have put a lot of years and thought into each painting.” young Ornette Coleman or the late Jean-Michel Basquiat. ––Peter Wiley Continued on page 22

12 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Suejin Jo Wins New York Artists Equity’s Solo Show Competition he huge turnout for the recent dinner at displaced per- Tthe National Arts Club celebrating the son.” 60th Anniversary of New York Artists Perhaps that Equity Association, as well as the 97th last sentence birthday of Will Barnet, one of its founding about displace- members, demonstrated the high esteem in ment hints at which NYAEA is held in the art world. the sense of Thus it would be a visibility-enhancing melancholy per- boon to vading some of the career Jo’s paintings in of any oil and dried artist to pigment on win the canvas. prizes However, it is a awarded lyrical, almost in the lilting melan- organiza- choly, suggest- tion’s ing the ulti- recent mately uplifting juried musical score exhibi- that Jo refers to tion. in her artist’s Suejin Jo, statement, Suejin Jo rather than a a widely the lines like stops on a subway map, wittily sense of bitterness or alienation. In this exhibited delineates what could appear to be an escape regard, her work calls to mind Loren Margery Small painter route from a brewing aesthetic dilemma. MacIver, an earlier artist active in the 1940s Although Suejin Jo happens to be one of and ‘50s, for its poetic effect. those artists whose titles are intriguing For while Jo’s paintings appear to be enough to add an element of entertaining more consciously concerned with formal guesswork to her compositions, the main issues than MacIver’s, the two painters thrust of her paintings is obviously the for- arrive at a similar synthesis of the abstract mal interplay between her linear ecriture, and the allusive, although they come at it which can resemble Cy Twombly’s elegant from opposite directions. In her most graffiti, and her delicately modulated color famous painting, “Hopscotch, 1940,” in the fields. At the same time, one can’t discount collection of the Museum of Modern Art, literal content when the circular shapes for example, MacIver makes an abstract quantified in the titles of paintings such as composition from the detailed depiction of “Double Play” and “Triple Play,” doodled a city pavement covered with children’s like loose cartoon spirals, suggest unraveling chalk marks. But the title of Jo’s “Water Merrill Steiger baseballs. Lily” seems an afterthought, perhaps arrived Similarly, when Jo calls another painting at after the artist realized that her abstract born in Seoul, Korea, now living in New “Thousand Kisses Deep,” how can the composition of yellow circles floating over a York City, who won The NYAEA 2008 viewer not project a sense of emotionally luminous color field further activated by Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Solo fervent romantic longing onto its composi- gracefully swirling linear forms projected a Exhibition Award, proves to be a worthy tion of impetuous linear gestures juxtaposed lyricism reminiscent of Monet’s most honoree, as do Merrill Steiger, who won the with an artful scattering of slightly blurred famous masterpiece. Jack T. Stewart Memorial Award, and red blotches, suggesting lipstick traces dis- One can only imagine that the title for Margery Small, winner of the James Gorden solving in rain or in tears? “Blowing in the Wind,” another composi- Schnell Memorial Award. The intriguing tension between abstract tion by Jo recalling a song by Bob Dylan Suejin Jo, who studied at the Art purity and the hints of specific things and and juxtaposing larger orange orbs and Students League and Columbia University, feelings that appear to intrude here and tighter linear scrawls, set against a delicately says of her work (which will be on view at there on her compositions makes Suejin Jo mottled color field of primarily pale green Broome Street Gallery, 498 Broome Street seem a quintessentially postmodern painter. and cloudy tan hues, came about similarly, from June 10 through 22, with a reception Indeed, these contradictions in her work, when the finished painting spoke to the on June 12 from 6 to 8pm), “My paintings which provide her with fodder for working artist, revealing its ostensible theme. And show marks of synthesis of two opposite ele- out complex solutions to the issues of oppo- while a canvas called “Somewhere ments such as ‘sharp and soft,’ ‘fragile and sition and duality that she cites as inspira- Nowhere,” in which precise orange and solid,’ ‘here and there,’ ‘in and out.’ I try to tion, leave much room for the expansion black circles interact with loosely flowing achieve this duality by using defined lines and growth of her aesthetic direction, mak- white linear forms, appears to allude to and color fields with solid forms. The ulti- ing her seem a most auspicious choice for nothing more tangible or specific than the mate composition floats lightly in space as if the honor that has been bestowed upon her artist’s fascination with opposites, “Way it was a musical score played by a master by New York Artists Equity. Out,” where the colored dots connect with musician. This is the story of my life as a ––Ed McCormack

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 13 Ripe for Discovery: Recent MFAs From Western Connecticut State Showcased in Chelsea iven the mercenary and River School and the green Gfiscal-minded climate of Connecticut Impressionists, it leaves in the current art scene, one stands to reason that land- the fore- can’t help finding significance scape would exert a strong ground. in the fact that some of the presence. More than one or Mahan city’s most extensive art cov- two of these young artists, double- erage is to be found in the however, manages to invest majored in conservative daily The New a scene that might have Studio Art York Sun. Just as germane is exuded pastoral serenity in an and the fact that when the paper earlier age with hints of a Zoology chose recently to do a “think” peculiarly contemporary anxi- for her ety. B.A. at piece on MFA thesis shows Carla Lindsey they chose to headline it Carla Lindsey’s oil on can- Suny, “Columbia’s MFA Thesis Michel Belknap vas “One Day He Will Oswego, but it seems clear here that the art Show Sets a Reunite Us” depicts slender part won out. High Bar,” bare-limbed trees at the entrance to a wood Fragments of somewhat jumbled, dis- without real- casting their ghostly shadows on a blanket parate imagery merge intriguingly with ele- ly explaining of snow. Lindsay’s painting projects a cool ments of geometric abstraction in Philip why they clarity of statement, subtly shaded by the Lique’s intriguing mixed media work “Deer thought so elegiac mood Population 2007.” or even implied in the title. Through somewhat describing Deann J. oblique visual strategies, any of the Matheny, on the Lique seems to critique work on other hand, treats the very fabric of reality. view. tree-limbs and J.D. Richey casts four Moreover, leaves as an occasion figures within an irregu- the only for detailed yet suc- larly shaped format to other J. D. Richey culent paint han- create a strong contem- schools they dling in a manner Philip Lique porary allegory in an mentioned in connection with the article akin to Neil Welliver’s wilderness composi- urban setting: A sensitive-looking young were equally fashionable ones, such as the tions, in an oil on panel “Untitled.” man with a sparse beard and crossed arms, Yale University School of Art and the Matheny, however, zooms possibly a portrait of the artist, stands School of Art at the California School of the in closer for a tightly his ground defiantly against three Arts (which, as it happens, does not even cropped composition with jeering Philistine tormentors. present an MFA exhibition). more compressed spatial Anna Myers, an illustration major, tensions. offers lyrical relief with a delightful Then there is Michel oil on paper entitled “Rainbow Isle,” Belknap, whose acrylic which combines the imaginative painting on paper, innocence of a Henri Rousseau with “Relevee,” is notable for the sophisticated technique of a its combination of muted Maurice Sendak. But even in this tonal harmonies in a idyllic fantasy of a gentle leopard Anna Meyers range of subdued greens, with antlers peering out from a flow- That said, one of the most rewarding as well as for its tactile ery lair where a white bird perches MFA exhibitions to be seen this season is surface. Belknap turns a on a branch, a schooner in the dis- that of Western Connecticut State simple image of a clump tance and its crew rowing ashore University, a smaller school you may never of foliage into an essen- Deann J. Matheny strike a slightly ominous note of have heard of, which, under the direction of tially abstract exercise in painterly vigor. coming change. its co-coordinators Margaret Grimes and Another artist with a strongly subjective Robert Storr, the John Wallace, both working painters, consis- sense of nature, Kevin Dwyer, makes bleak- director of the Yale tently graduates some of the ness an aesthetic attribute in an University School of most interesting young acrylic on board called “Winter Arts, is quoted in the artists to be seen anywhere Landscape–– Facing East.” In a aforementioned arti- in the country. The WCSU palette limited to gray tones laid cle on MFA thesis Spring 2008 Thesis down with splintery, agitated shows as saying that Exhibition, which will open strokes, Dwyer endows angst that one of the on June 17 and run through with a grim grace akin to the prospects that worries July 5, with a reception June Neo-Expressionism of Anselm him is artists being 19 from 5 to 8 PM at Blue Kiefer. plucked out of such Mountain Gallery, 530 West By contrast, Sarah Mahan shows prematurely by 25th Street, is one of the employs strident color effectively art dealers. One Sarah Mahan best to date. in “Spectacled Langur,” her oil could think of worse fates, however, for the Since the WCSU is nes- of a purple primate crouching artists in the WSCU exhibition, most of tled in the bucolic setting anxiously on a tree limb, set whom appear ready for their close-up. that inspired the Hudson Kevin Dwyer against red-violet sky with large ––Ed McCormack

14 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 A Language of the Sublime: The Paintings of J. Dule ubtlety and sensitivity to nuance are compositions may be depicted in tones Squalities hardly as highly prized as of ocher that approximate the color of they should be in an art world that all sand, the sky above may be laid down too often honors only the gaudy, the in a shade of violet unlike anything showy, and the overblown. Yet on those actually occurring in nature. Or it is just relatively rare occasions when one as likely for the sky to be a more or less encounters these qualities in a contem- naturalistic blue hue, while the land porary work of art they are immediately below emits a radiant tangerine glow. recognizable and refresh one’s faith in Dule’s delicate glazes of luminous painting, particularly, as a contemplative color need conform to no known mod- activity which can touch upon the els because he has evolved a style that divine in the simple pursuit of a conjures up an emotional sense of place formal ideal. rather than its mere physical representa- The “Seaside Series” of the tion. His paintings reinvent the visible Connecticut painter J. Dule, seen world from the inside out with such recently in his first New York solo show lyrical completeness as to imbue them at New Art Center, 580 Eighth Avenue, The vaporousness of Dule’s surfaces and with a verisimilitude that transcends lit- is an excellent case in point. One happens the amorphousness of his forms suggest a eral appearances. upon such an exhibition with a sense of hav- purity of vision verging on the magical. It “In the age of photography and computer ing discovered something at once unassum- can be compared to the grace and economy images,” Dule has stated, “I have found ing and wondrous. of Asian painting and can also suggest an painting to be either one of two endeavors. Apparently, earlier in his career, Dule was improbable yet successful synthesis of the The first is an exploration of materials, colors influenced by Frank Auerbach and Karel elegant shorthand of John Marine’s mari- and textures and the rich tapestry of creation Appel, artists given to the use of strident nescapes and the spiritual resonance of Mark when they are brought together in unique color and thick impasto stressing the palpa- Rothko’s abstractions. ways. The second is the appearance of ble physicality of pigment. His present While Dule’s compositions evoke a con- abstract images out of the subconscious mind work, however, is almost ethereal for his use vincing sense of natural spaces, often con- expressing deep emotions and sensibilities.” of translucent washes of luminous color that sisting of stretches of land or sandy beach In his “Seaside Series,” what Dule finally call to mind Constable’s remark about and vast expanses of sky, they are by means gives us is not the logic of things as we J.M.W. Turner: “He seems to paint with restricted to conventional color choices. know them but a hint of the sublime. tinted steam, so effervescent and so airy.” Thus while the rhythmic dunes in one of his ––Byron Coleman Martina O’Brien Melds Elements of Landscape and Abstraction lthough she is inspired by the example To endow her paintings fleeting facets of weather occur- Aof Mondrian to regard her composi- with physical presence, ring in time, even as her primary tions as geometric constructs, the painterly O’Brien applies thick layers focus appears to be on creating process of the Irish artist Martina O’Brien oil impasto with a brush, a formal statement in contem- quickly dissolves overt geometry in atmos- then scrapes the canvas porary aesthetics, expressing the pherics akin to those of Turner and with a palette knife, creat- postmodern duality that mani- Constable, in her canvases on view at Agora ing tactile ridges of pig- fests in the tantalizing tension Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June 3 ment that impart to their between abstract form and sub- through 24. (Reception Thursday, June 5, surfaces distinct vertical and ject matter. from 6 to 8 PM.) horizontal structures, While O’Brien’s landscapes A strong sense of landscape and seascape which stabilize her freely appear quintessentially Irish, provide a phantom armature for O’Brien’s flowing forms in the man- invested with all the poetry, ostensibly abstract compositions, which ner of a grid, reminding us “Tide Upon Tide, Late myth, and romance that we invariably evoke intermingling clouds, mists, that her paintings are Afternoon, Brittas Bay” associate with that fabled coun- and watery expanses in a manner reminis- autonomous aesthetic entities rather than try, they are, in fact, almost equally informed cent of the ethereally floating vistas of classi- mere illusions of reality. by impressions culled from her travels in cal Chinese scrolls, albeit very much in the On one level, then, O’Brien’s paintings China, Vietnam, India and the Middle East. tradition of Western painting and fortified are the most materially palpable of art Thus they are actually universal composites by the rich heft and depth of oils on canvas. objects, with their encrusted pile-up of pig- filled with a timeless allusiveness, finally tran- Trained at Dun Laoighaire College of mentation evoking the very substance of the scending the particulars of any one locale yet Art and Design and The National College of Irish earth more in the manner of surro- possessed of a striking unity of surface. of Art and Design, O’Brien is “a painter’s gates than representations. On another level, Although some titles, such as “Where painter,” possessed of remarkable technical however, her compositions are the most Connamera Meets the Atlantic” and finesse, which puts at her disposal an arsenal ethereal of things, evoking elusive nuances “Kenmare Bay,” allude to specific places, of dazzling effects. A consummate colorist, of light and air that can transport the viewer others such as “Soft Waters Ebb and Flow,” she employs a seemingly infinite range of as readily as any romantic landscape of the and “Cradle of Illumination” express the blues, grays, and browns to conjure up past by virtue of their atmospheric qualities overall poetic magnitude of the artistic shimmering panoramas of air, light, and and sensitivity to the salient particulars of vision of Martina O’Brien, whose paintings liquescent reflections, in which craggy rock natural phenomena. grace several important collections in formations and land masses rise here and Like Constable, who declared, “No two Ireland and seem a sure bet to achieve an there out of the primordial mist like hump- days are alike, not even two hours,” O’Brien enthusiastic following in the United States backed whales or shadowy sea monsters. evokes, from painting to painting, a sense of as well. ––Marilyn Schleifer

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 15 FANCY DELANCEY STARBUCKS BOHEMIA: The New Museum and the New Lower East Side Gallery Scene by Ed McCormack spanking new corporate logo. “When I heard the New Museum was To someone who actually grew up Lately, style pieces about LES and shop- opening on the Bowery, I knew we had to around here and can remember when peo- pers’ guides to its goodies––from the bialys be close to that action,“ says one of the ple built pigeon coops rather than pent- at Kossar's to the pickles at Guss’s to the “Prima Gallerinas,” Fabienne Stephan, houses on tenement rooftops, the very idea designer dresses and shoes at Narnia––have director of Salon 94, at 1 Freeman Alley, off of a Starbucks on Delancey Street still seems been appearing everywhere, always with a Rivington Street, a satellite of a the Upper almost surreal. But there it is, right on the nostalgic angle, as in the AM New York East Side gallery of the same name. corner of Allen and Delancey, not far from headline, “Echoes of Old Clash With Hip.” Curiously yet predictably, other established that other glaring incongruity: Bernard A far cry from Stewart Meyer’s 1984 novel venues have not been above following the Tschumi’s glass-fronted “Blue Building,” “The Lotus Crew,” with lines like action, including Woodward Gallery, for- one of several residential towers and design- “Delancey Street crackled shameless like a merly of Soho, which recently featured an er hotels newly risen amid all manner of neon leper colony,” Richard Price’s new exhibition of Deborah Claxton’s exquisitely recent renovations, extensions, and architec- book “Lush Life” nails the neighborhood’s intricate col- tural anomalies hastily grafted onto the newfound mix of historical self-conscious- lages in its downtown skyline––aesthetics be damned! ness and artsy attitude. Hawking Jacob Riis large, almost At least Sol Moscot Opticians (“Since prints from the 1880s to a club owner, one incongruously 1915”) and Jimmy Jazz homeboy wear are character spritzs, “The man was light years elegant space still standing on the corner of Orchard and ahead of his time, total multimedia.” at 133 Delancey. But another condo monstrosity is Even the pilot issue of Page Six, the New Eldridge going up on the old site of Dunkin Donuts York Post’s slick new life-style supplement Street. and the 99¢ Store, within spitting distance for the clueless, featured an article called Perhaps to of where the big yawning yap of the “Prima Gallerinas,” all about how in the lend it an Williamsburg Bridge swallows and regurgi- “exciting new gallery scene on the Lower edginess in tates traffic to and from another former East Side, an emerging group of women is keeping with slum in Brooklyn that has likewise morphed taking the spotlight.” the new into high-end haven for creative hipsterism. If the East Village scene of the 1980s was locale, they “What’s missing from the American driven by a desire to create an alternative to called the underground?” the novelist Bruce the art establishment, the stampede to the show, Brandon Herman, from Benderson asked rhetorically in an essay Lower East Side started with the news that “Extreme “My Vacation with a called “Toward the New Degeneracy.” “Not the establishment was building a branch Paper.” Kidnapper,” Envoy Gallery publicity or funding, but vital links to the downtown. More what one might expect in these hot culture of poverty.” Yet any of the aspiring yet still raw environs is Envoy, at 131 performance artists ensconced in Starbucks, Chrystie Street, where we saw Brandon tapping away at their laptops or conferring Herman’s five foot high cast-fiberglass car- with their agents on their cells between sips toon cat-head and Michael Yinger’s floor of skinny latte, would be conversant with at sculpture of an American flag composed of least the historical fact of poverty on the shell-casings, shot glasses, animal bones, and Lower East Side. You can’t avoid it, the way sundry other objects de kitsch. Both were the local color has been exploited since the highlights of the two artists’ adjoining the clubs, boutiques, and art galleries started first solo shows at the gallery. opening and the condos started going up “I moved here in 2006, before I even down here. knew the New Museum was coming,” Jimi As soon as it became clear that the Lower Dams, the gallery director told us. “It had East Side was going to be The Next Big nothing to do with the museum. I just felt Thing, pictures of teeming tenement streets, that Chelsea was turning into a horrible art crowded with pushcarts back in the day, mall and had to get out of there.” became prominent in the local decor, and Another outlet for emerging talents, the real estate sharks started brainstorming Never Work Gallery, occupying a tiny store- for a marketable acronym. First they floated front at 191 Henry Street, seemingly spe- “LoHo” (as in SoHo and NoHo) to the cializes in intimate-scaled painterly abstrac- media, and it turned up in an article here tion akin to the Neo-Naturism of Gregory and there but somehow didn’t stick. The Amenoff and Bill Jensen. Gallery director Lower East Side Business Improvement Siobhan Lowe told a reporter she has to District (BID) got in on the act with work seven days a week, sometimes moon- “LES,” just the initials, which look great on lighting as an accountant, to make the a T-shirt. Then some genius came up with rent––which may be why we had to view the slogan “LES is More. Explore.” And Deborah Claxton, “Governor of Day” the show through the window when we suddenly my funky old neighborhood had a 2007, Woodward Gallery stopped by one day during business hours.

16 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 “Must be a great show,” said a bearded illusions of space, light, and shadow. Next, I intended to have Jeannie help me dude in a derby and black frock-coat, as he Shadows, real rather than illusory, are an pick out a leather jacket in the same place passed by and noticed us with our noses even a more prominent element in the where I once bought one that I wore in pressed against the glass. Above the waist he Hong Kong-born American artist Paul high school. But when we got to Orchard looked much as his great grandfather must Chan’s digital wall and floor projections, Street, we suddenly found ourselves have when he landed on Ellis Island; but his first exhibited in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. engulfed by an outdoor fashion show put shredded jeans and western boots were Chan’s pieces are quaintly kinetic, as though on by one of the East Village-style bou- strictly hipster. cast by an antique “magic lantern,” lending tiques that were just then beginning to Like the Lower East Side Tenement them a seance-like sense of mystery, as replace a few of the old bargain stores–– Museum, a former tenement now divested phantom birds soar over silhouetted tele- robotic “house” muzak blasting; bodacious- of tenants, where actors in period costumes phone poles and fruits float up from a bowl ly sashaying punkette models trailed by a give walking tours of the past, his get-up until it is empty. As far as digital projections video crew–– and I knew right away that made perfect sense in a neighborhood that go, his playfully occult pieces are a lot more this was the beginning of some kind of end. increasingly seems like an ironic living diora- lyrical than Tony Oursler’s rubbery lips that * * * ma. sneer at the viewer, “What are you looking The forces of civic promotion were work- at? I’ll fuck you up!” ing overtime one recent Tuesday afternoon. The very location of the New Museum The eager BID PR kids were busy handing seems to call out for an ironic detachment out the “Go East LES Shopping & Dining to match its Pop facade–– if only to avoid Guide” in their storefront visitor’s center on descending into unfashionable humanist Broome Street. And on Orchard Street, the bathos or bitter social satire. Either that or gift shop of the Tenement Museum was as settle for the steady diet of sensationalism on crowded as the D-train at rush hour, doing which so many other museums are forced a brisk business in LES t-shirts, nostalgic by the short attention span of an over-enter- picture books, and historical chotchkas like tained populace to subsist. The Abts and the authentic replica of an 1800s “NO Chan exhibitions, however, suggest a com- IRISH NEED APPLY” sign that we could- mendable sense of formal focus amid the n’t resist picking up as a birthday gift for distractions of a thoroughfare where one our design and production ace Karen can still pass from the fashionable to the Mullen. flea-bitten within a single block; from “How long do you think it will take for crowds of strolling fashion victims wearing this place to turn into Whole Foods?” their affluence on their backs to a lone soul Jeannie asked later, as we strolled through in putrid tatters, sitting on a box outside the the cavernous Essex Market, another throw- Salvation Army Christian Corps, studiously back to my childhood, where there’s now picking at running sores on his grossly an art gallery, cleverly named Cuchifritos, swollen legs. among the stalls selling everything from * * * Goya canned beans to Calvin Klein jeans. Photo: Antonio Heurto My classic “there goes the neighbor- Looking around at some of the more * * * hood” moment came about four of five trendy vendors, including a fancy chocolati- For an institution sporting an audacious years ago, while subjecting my wife to one er, that have cropped up among the older facade of six precariously staggered silver of the periodic walking tours that she wryly ethnic fruit stands, fish stalls, and botanicas, boxes, one emblazoned with the slogan refers to as my “sentimental journeys.” We I knew what she meant: How long before “Hell, yes!” in rainbow-colored bubble-let- had already swung by the settlement house that Hispanic couple huddled with their lit- ters, the New Museum of Contemporary on Henry Street, where there used to be tle daughter among hanging sport coats and Art can be awfully unfrivolous. Granted, the afternoon art classes to keep us off the party dresses, eating arroz con pollo out of museum’s inaugural survey of collage and streets and Friday night dances that often aluminum takeout-trays behind a proud dis- assemblage, “Unmonumental,” was pre- ended in gang fights. I had pointed out play of their wedding pictures, will no dictably raucous. But that its first two solo where our building had been; where my longer be able to afford the rent on their shows, concurrent exhibitions by Tomma grandfather kept a pigeon coop on the roof tiny clothing stall? Abts and Paul Chan, could hardly be called and would stand out on the ledge, wiry and Cuchifritos, on the other hand, will prob- crowd-pleasers seems to bode well for its fearless, swinging a long bamboo pole to ably be around for awhile––at least until the potential to rise above the obvious. conduct his swirling flock high above the upscale bars, clubs and boutiques are such a Born in Germany, now based in London, tenement tops. We had walked through the draw that the neighborhood doesn’t need where she was awarded the prestigious courtyard of the Vladeck Houses, where my the cultural panache of art galleries any- Turner Prize in 2006, Tomma Abts is a friends and I would harmonize acappella to more. In the meantime, Cuchifritos was painter of small, precise geometric abstrac- rhythm and blues tunes in the acoustical staking its claim on avant gardeness with “If tions. Unlike the large-scale narrative Neo- project hallways and stairwells. And I had There Ever Was: an exhibition of extinct Expressionism practiced by Neo Rauch's’ shown her the rubbled lot on Clinton and impossible smells.” followers in the Leipzig School, her work Street, where the 7th Precinct used to be, It consisted of seven “olfactory images” has no novelty value whatsoever. Yet its inti- and where my friend Ronnie and I had contained in objects that resembled deodor- mate rewards are many for those who find spent several hairy hours in a holding pen, ant sticks and were lined up on a table for pleasure in precise interplays of form and being interrogated and terrorized by a pair visitors to pick up and sniff. Accompanying color, tactile pentimento (resulting from a of drunken detectives over a stupid misun- texts told us that their scents had been cre- process that involves numerous smooth lay- derstanding, until our parents were called ated by “some of the most renowned ers of acrylic and oil pigments), and subtle out of bed to come and collect us. ‘trained noses’ in fragrance design.” These

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 17 scents were meant to evoke subjects ranging of vintage eyeglasses, encased in plexiglass from the aftermath of the atomic blast at and labeled “Moscot Originals,” hang like Hiroshima to wild plants rendered extinct sculptures on the walls, and a suitably by deforestation to a convicted murderer’s scruffy young man named Jacob Morris has last meal to a bottle of perfume discovered been installed as a gallery receptionist. in a leather satchel on the ocean floor after “I get paid to sit on my butt all day and the Titanic sank. To one viewer whose olfac- do nothing,” he says with a shrug and a sly tory perceptions were perhaps not as subtle hipster smile. “Hey, I’m not complaining, as they should have been, however, they man!” suggested nothing so much as seven differ-

Shalom Neuman, from “Toxic Paradise” FusionArts Museum FusionArts Museum * * * Could it be that funky facade, so proudly “Maybe they don’t like our facade,” redolent of anti-establishment chic, looks Shalom Neuman was musing, referring to radically out of sync with the pristine, white- the funky spray-painted metalwork swarm- walled “professionalism” of its neighbors? ing the front of the FusionArts Museum, at Four doors down, former 57th Street 57 Stanton Street, as he stood inside, sur- resident Luxe Gallery’s neat white cube at rounded by his eerie “Toxic Paradise” land- 53 Stanton Street was featuring Amelie scapes, neon-lit oil slicks and swampy land- Chabannes’s reptilian neo-pointillist self- fills limned with a perverse finesse reminis- portraits on wood and weird little waxen Sol Moscot, “Grandma Sylvia Coming cent of the Hudson River School masters, heads. Next door at the same address, Home from a Cruise in 1949.” albeit updated with flashing lights and bar- Smith-Stewart Gallery, run by a former nacled with super hero plastic figurines. curator for P.S. 1, Los Angeles artist ent brands of glue stick. Hugely talented, a true pioneer of hyper- Georganne Deen was showing whimsical More evocative in terms of its site-specific kinetic multimedia, Shalom shrugged off oils depicting romantic entanglements historical relevance was the exhibition on the slight like the old school bohemian that between nubile nymphs and furry animals the ground floor of Sol Moscot Opticians, he is: what do you expect from The System? suggesting the doodled looseleaf fantasies of which has recently been turned into a Meanwhile, his more volatile manager especially wicked adolescent girls. gallery featuring blown-up family snapshots Deborah Fries was fuming about taking a No one is even trying to pretend that the and vintage photographs of the Lower East costly ad with Art in America, only to have LES scene constitutes any kind of indige- Side from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s by Sol Shalom’s show ignored and their venue left nous upstart movement –– not when a big, himself. Starting with a patriarchal white- out of the magazine’s guide to “Selected established gallery like Janos Gat deliberately bearded portrait of his father, Hyman LES Galleries.” After all, FusionArts was moves down from the Upper East Side in Moscot, who started selling ready-made already here in the early ’80s, showing mul- order to be close to the New Museum, and eyeglasses from a pushcart on Orchard timedia, multidisciplinary work that therefore convenient to visiting curators. In Street shortly after arriving from Eastern Deborah refers to as “assemblage on its generous space at 195 Bowery, Gat Europe in 1899, the pictures chronicle four steroids” decades before the LES gallery recently mounted a show of Israeli-born generations of the family, which has been in scene exploded. Besides the legendary ABC realist Ra’anan Levy’s large oils of chillingly business on the Lower East Side for 90 Rio, it’s the only surviving pioneer of the anthropomorphic stainless steel sinks, their years. East Village era, even though Stanton Street drain-holes suggesting gaping mouths and Especially fascinating is a black and white was so deep in the belly of the beast that it eye sockets, their faucets leaking rusty print called “Grandma Sylvia Coming frequently got left out of the Alphabet City water, evoking bloody noses or diseased Home from a Cruise in 1949,” showing a roll call as well. penises. woman in a mink coat with bleached blond Even the Abrons Arts Center of The On street-level in the same building, hair and shoulders like a linebacker coming Henry Street Settlement and the Art Gallery DCKT Contemporary, another established through a door like gangbusters, the noir of The Educational Alliance, neighborhood venue relocated from Chelsea, showed pho- silhouette of a man’s fedora visible behind social organizations that date all the way tographs and videos by Josh Azzarella, in her. She is wearing dangling earrings and back to the first waves of immigrants before which significant details of familiar news ornate sunglasses. Her painted lips form a the turn of the century, have been included images and film footage were altered to pro- big “O” as two small children rush to in the gallery guides and benefitted from all voke unexpected emotional responses. embrace her. It is an image worthy of Diane the recent LES publicity, while FusionArts Particularly affecting was Azzarella’s catch- Arbus. has once again been overlooked. So you your-breath-then-sigh-with-relief video Along with the photographs, several pair have to wonder: Could Shalom be right? sequence in which the members of a road

18 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 one encoun- ters in “fragile architec- tural land- scapes.” The poignant sense of urban flux that the installa- tion evoked reminded Ra’anan Levy, “Cloaca Maxima, 2007,” me of Courtesy Janos Gat Gallery walking over to Amelie Chabannes, “Intimate Georganne Deen, “The Inner Cry” 2008, Essex Street just a few minutes earlier from Biometrics #3” 2007, oil on linen, 55" x 40", Courtesy of Orchard Gallery, 47 Orchard Street, where Luxe Gallery Smith-Stewart, New York we had just seen an exhibition of portrait crew working on a downtown street periodically presents events by innovative drawings by Amy Sillman. As we stepped out suddenly look up in unison to watch a plane figures such as vivacious downtown per- of the gallery, a young boy nearby yelled sev- fly harmlessly past the Twin Towers of the formance diva Vernita Nemec and avant eral times up to a tenement across the street. World Trade Center. garde dancer Yoshiko Chuma, drawing Finally, a woman appeared in one of the win- At Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie crowds that often spill out onto the sidewalk dows and dropped down to him something Street (which also maintains a branch in from its small storefront space. wrapped in paper that made a smacking Chelsea) a large abstract mixed media work Among other new and promising gal- sound when it landed in the gutter. called “A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after leries is Number 35, confusingly located at “That was a common thing when I was Shakespeare and Mendelssohn)” had per- 39 Essex Street, a tiny storefront a few growing up down here,” I told my wife. “If sonal meaning for me, since it was credited doors down from G&S Sporting Goods, you wanted to buy something from the to “Tim Rollins & K.O.S. with the Henry where I once bought a pair of flashy satin candy store, you’d call up to your mother Street Settlement kids.” How cool to see trunks for a career as an amateur boxer in and she’d ball some change up in a piece of big time gallery representation for kids from the Police Athletic League (soon to be newspaper and drop it down to you. We the same inner city social agency where I abruptly aborted by a single bout with a called it ‘air mail.’ It’s the same term people learned, almost a lifetime ago, to take fine scrappy colored kid who looked like he had used when they tossed garbage out the win- art almost as seriously as E.C. Comics! rickets). At Number 35, we saw further evi- dow into the air-shaft.” The long-term vitality of the LES scene, dence of the tendency of even the more Then Jeannie pointed out to me how the however, will depend not on the major deal- modest LES venues to import international tenement was hemmed in on both sides by ers who establish outposts downtown to be talent as well as recruiting artists locally. An other structures surrounded by scaffolding in profitable proximity to the “action,” but art duo from Berlin called Kreissel & Kerber and shrouded like Christos in that yellow with smaller grass-roots venues like Gallery had filled the entire space with a site-specific Tyvek material that makes buildings under 128, 128 Rivington Street, where Namiyo installation called “First Thing Tomorrow renovation look gift-wrapped. And once Kubo, who was trained in traditional paint- Morning.” Comprised of plywood planks, again the vanished world of my childhood ing in her native Japan but became an shards of foamcore, snapshots of demolition felt as atmospherically dreamy, distant, and abstract artist after moving to New York in sites, and computer-generated vector-draw- imaginary as Herbert Asbury’s classic tome 1982, recently showed her “Water Series,” ings suggesting scaffolding, the installation of tabloid sociology, “The Gangs of New vibrant gestural compositions on wall-size recreated what the artists call the “support- York.” sheets of handmade paper. Gallery 128 also ing constructions and temporary structures” For a kid growing up in this then still- provincial neighborhood in the 1950s, after all, the rickety Rube Goldberg contraption at the Streit Matzo factory, on Rivington street, that ran the matzos along a conveyor belt after they came out of the ovens and cut them into uniform sheets to be boxed, seemed like one of the mechanical wonders of the world. On warm summer nights, they’d roll the big corrugated steel door up to let the heat from the ovens out and the mouthwatering fragrance of fresh-baked unleavened bread would permeate the sur- Josh Azzarella, “Untitled #39 (265) rounding blocks, luring us in to sample the [detail], 2007,” Courtesy Simon Preston Namiyo Kubo, “Red Stratum,” Courtesy broken matzos that the bakers tossed into Gallery Gallery 128 big barrels for the taking.

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 19 it,” I said. with them; to get 1970s-style shag haircuts “A lot of in the unisex salons; to eat dumplings in the galleries bakeries along East Broadway. Some of don’t like them even come to get married. The store- to admit front wedding salons like Just Pretty Bridal that they offer a package deal: For a set fee you can rent their rent the gowns and tuxes for the entire space.” wedding party. They do everybody’s hair “I sup- right there in the store and take them pose we’re uptown in ribbon-festooned stretch limou- sort of sines for a photo session in Central Park. transpar- Afterward, they all return to Chinatown ent,” he for a banquet in one of the more moderate- said with a priced restaurants, a big photo blow-up of little the bride and groom displayed on an easel laugh. in the entryway. Then the gowns and tuxes The show was Daniel Joseph Martinez, “It’s just a little headache, it’s just a little bruise by Mirjam redemption of the flesh. The politics of the future as urgent as the blue sky, Thomann 2008” prosthetics, taxidermy, metal, plastic, corn syrup, food coloring, and Jan mechanical apparatus, dimensions variable, Courtesy the artist, Simon Timme. Preston and The Project, New York Called “In Those pleasant memories were evoked and Out of Context,” it was presented by momentarily when we walked into the inau- Galerie Christian Nagel, based in Cologne gural exhibition of the Simon Preston and Berlin. The gallery space, just to the Gallery, in its impressive new space at 301 right of the reception area, was empty Broome Street, where an installation by except for a couple of tall mirrors leaning Daniel Joseph Martinez occupied the entire against a couple of the walls, as though front room. It consisted of a machine that waiting to be installed. If you looked into appeared to be of similar dimensions to the the mirrors from certain angles you could one at the old matzo factory, with similarly see, outside one of the windows, a sign complex configurations of pulleys and belts affixed to the face of the building: five illu- in constant motion. Only, the function of minated white plastic squares held together this mechanical marvel was to position and by a vertical metal bar, each containing a aim a dead rabbit with the pointing finger of single red letter, spelling out the word a prosthetic hand sticking out of its snout, “ANGEL.” (It would only dawn on me spewing buckets of fake blood all over the later that it was a play on the name of the walls and floor, implicating the viewer, visiting gallery “Nagel.”) according to the gallery press release, in “a Beyond the sign was a bird’s eye-view of spectacle of violence” that “fuses the body East Broadway, looking south to where the horror of Cronenberg sci-fi with a mutating Twin Towers used to dominate the skyline. Nietzchean uber-man.” This is an especially bustling intersection, Mirjam Thomann and Jan Timme, “In * * * popular with the Fukianese, the most recent and Out of Context,” Rental Gallery Since real estate now determines so much immigrants from China, people of whose of the reality of the New York art world, irrepressible vitality the long-resident are returned to the store and everybody gets Rental Gallery, in a loft on the sixth floor of Cantonese and the ABC’s (American born back on the bus, much in the manner of a tenement at 120 East Broadway that used Chinese) often seem somewhat wary. Cinderella’s coach turning into a pumpkin. to be an illegal Chinese gambling casino, On Tuesday, the big day for gathering on I once saw a beautiful little bride daintily may be one of the most relevant venues––at East Broadway, droves of Fukianese come all lift the hem of her gown to step over a pud- least conceptually. the way from Philadelphia, Washington dle, as she alighted like a butterfly from the “So let me make sure I understand this,” D.C., and godknows where else on the limo. Under her rented wedding finery, she I said. “You rent the gallery to other gal- take-your-life-in-your-hands economy wore big, clumsy work boots. leries from out of town who want to put on express buses. Young women who work for shows in New York?” the bus companies stand out on the side- “Interesting show,” I told Joel Mesler. “Most of them are from Europe, a cou- walk, chanting, “Going to D.C.? Going to “Very evocative.” ple from L.A.,” the gallery director, Joel Philly?” Some of them practically push you “Glad you enjoyed it.” Mesler, said from behind his high white onto the buses, even if you’re a “lo fan” “I think I’ll take the catalog,” I said, reception desk, where he sat with a silent, (foreign devil). They’re determined that you handing him two dollars. enigmatically smiling young female assistant. should go to Washington or Philadelphia “Great,” he said. “Make sure that one Like a lot of the other more marginal entre- whether you have business there or not! has the postcard in it.” preneurs in the Lower East Side art scene, The Fukianese come in to fraternize After we left, I imagined him saying to they looked like they were waiting for their with other Fukianese who live in his silent, smiling assistant, “Now we can ship to come in. He seemed to be growing Chinatown; to hang out in the crowded buy some dumplings.” a beard to pass the time. mall under the Manhattan Bridge; to shop “It’s cool that you’re so up-front about for clothes and food items to take home * * *

20 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Robert Cenedella: The Rebel Teacher and His Legions or his recent Class Show at The Art exams and no graduation ceremonies. There emigrated to the U.S. during the Nazi era FStudents League, Robert Cenedella, one isn’t even a lecture hall. The League is and was Cenedella’s teacher and the subject of our best satirical artists and one of the about one thing and one thing only: art.” of one of his most powerful paintings, “The most popular instructors at the League, pro- Much to his Death of George duced a hefty catalog called “art® Morning, credit, the works Grosz.” Noon and Night,” that doubles as a valu- reproduced in the There are also able historical document. catalog demon- fine essays by The iconoclastic Cenedella made Liz strate that, unlike a other League Smith’s column awhile back with his limited lot of other instruc- instructors such edition red lacquer wastepaper basket tors one could as Yasuo emblazoned with a portrait of George W. name, rather than Kuniyoshi, the Bush and the words “White Trash,” an turning out pla- Japanese expatri- exact replica of his Giant Waste Basket toons of “mini-me” ate who founded Sculpture. He also raised eyebrows on West acolytes, Cenedella Artists Equity 57th Street and ruffled a lot of feathers in inspires his students Association and the art world when he exhibited a painting to discover their Harry Sternberg, in the front windows of The League depict- own artistic attrib- who developed ing phony aesthetes in a museum genuflect- utes and develop silkscreen print- ing before a pedestal supporting a huge, their own unique ing as a fine art steaming pile of excrement. styles. But of even medium, among Cenedella’s Class Show catalog, however, greater interest to others who share is a contrastingly tender tribute to an institu- the general reader Cenedella’s belief tion of learning whose strength, he says, “ are the archival arti- in the social comes from within, in that “The League cles by past instruc- responsibility of does not sell degrees.” tors from ASL pub- the artist. What Scott Higgins, the editor of the catalog, lications dating I’ve always val- elaborates on this point in his introductory back to the 1920s, ued and enjoyed “The Death of George Grosz” notes: “The school was started in rebellion ’30s, and ’40s. most about and remains somewhat obdurate and mad- Among them are two essays, one on Robert Cenedella, in particular, is how he deningly contradictory. Calling it a school watercolor technique, the other decrying fulfills that responsibility with such high isn’t really correct; sure there are instructors commercialism in art, by the great German energy and irreverent good humor. and students, but there are no grades, no painter and draftsman George Grosz, who ––Ed McCormack Katrin Alvarez: Confronting and Banishing the Demons Within ike Marlene Dumas, an older artist with utility, partially covers her breasts with her traumas of youth appear to be a recurring Lwhom she shares certain qualities in hands as she wanders through a scorched theme for Alvarez, as seen in two other common, the German painter Katrin Alvarez earth landscape suggesting a post-nuclear works called “Chain of Childhood” and depicts aspects of human and societal rela- world. The young woman wears a dazed “I Survived My Childhood.” tionships through figures that often take on In both, luminous, clear-eyed portraits of a doll-like quality, in her exhibition at Agora women inhabit the foreground. But behind Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June 3 them, phantom-like memories lurk. In through 24. (Reception: Thursday, June 5, “I Survived My Childhood,” a masterfully 6 to 8pm.) drafted crayon on board, the background Many of the people that Alvarez paints figure resembles a ghostly relative of the seem to be somnambulists cut off somewhat protagonist of Edvard Much’s famous self-protectively from their own benumbed picture, “The Scream.” emotions, as they traverse desolate land- Perhaps Alvarez’s most disturbing image, scapes or appear locked into compartmental- however, is another crayon drawing on ized spaces that they cohabit but do not board entitled “Departure from Normal share with others whose sense of isolation is “Serenity of Being” Conditions,” where a woman with weird apparently every bit as severe as their own. protrusions sprouting for her limbs appears In an oil and mixed media work on can- expression such one sees only on the faces of to inhabit a surreal junk shop of mismatched vas called “The Painful Reality of Human the homeless; the sky above her appears human body parts. Even here, however, Relations,” for example, one nude figure incandescent with toxicity. As in the case of despite the grotesque subject matter, the inhabits a kind of bunker cut into the earth other great contemporary humanists such as artist’s refined draftspersonship saves the day, in a posture of despondency, while another, Gregory Gillespie and Odd Nerdrum, the turning something potentially ugly into a wearing black stockings, bares her buttocks severity of Alvarez’s vision is redeemed by thing of real beauty. in a gesture more derisive than seductive and her ability to transform potentially unpalat- It could very well be that Katrin Alvarez’ s yet others wander about disinterestedly in a able subjects into objects of aesthetic delecta- artistic mission is to teach us to look scene as evocatively conceived as one of Neo tion. unflinchingly at the demons that we all har- Rauch’s Leipzig tableaux and as bleakly exis- In another oil and mixed media painting bor, in the hope that by doing so we may tential as a stage drama by Samuel Beckett . on canvas entitled “Easy Prey,” for example, transcend the dangers that threaten us from Even more stark is “Slums of the Mind,” two ominous male figures appear to stalk a within. Surely this is one valid reason to in which the bust-level image of a young living doll with hinged arms resembling a make art, and if indeed this is the area that woman, her head surrounded by a strange, pubescent girl in scanty underwear, suggest- she has staked out for herself, well, no one skeletal rectangular structure of no known ing an allegory of pedophilia. Indeed, the does it better. ––Maureen Flynn JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 21 G&S NYC GUIDE opportunities notable exhibitions and events WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes ACA GALLERIES 529 W 20th St., Charles W. Hawthorne (1872-1930) new members from all geographic areas. There are approximately 14 A Life in Color; James Chapin (1887-1975) The Dark Side of Light exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. Music, Poetry, through June 27. 212 206 8080 www.acagalleries.com Theater and Dance programs available. Contact information: Tel. 212- 316-6024, email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL 8 W 8th St., Jilaine Jones Sculpture, Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, PO Box 527, Cathedral June 5-19, 2008 212 673 6466 www.nyss.org/jones Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. QCC ART GALLERY The City University of New York 222-05 56h Ave., 6-8pm, Sat.& Sun., 12 - 6pm. Bayside NY, Rudy Ernst, Multimedia Expressions thru June 28. 718 631 63 96 www.qccartgallery.org MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist portofolios for its new Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists THE 183RD ANNUAL: AN INVITATIONAL EXHIBITION are invited to submit. Sase, slides, photos and brief artist bio. Send to: OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ART The National Academy of Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, NYC 10001 Museum & School of Fine Arts 1083 Fifth Ave, NY, NY, through September 7, 2008. 212 369 4880 www.nationalacademy.org CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected frames & mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. LIC ART CENTER OPEN STUDIOS 44-02 23rd St. Long Island City, NY Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. 46/47St.) Hours: 12 - 6 pm, For information contact: Edgar Perez [email protected] Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected] For Directions:www.hopstop.com

ESTABLISHED CHELSEA GALLERY reviews artist portfolios monthly. NOHRA HAIME GALLERY 41 East 57th Street. Leopoldo Maler, Send sase or visit www.noho gallery.com for application form. Noho A multimedia Installation through July 3. 212-888-3550 Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001. 212 367-7063 KATHARINA RICH PERLOW Gallery 41 East 57th Street, POETRY AND WRITING MENTOR. Award winning artist and pub- Raymond Hendler and Artists from his ‘avant garde’ Circle June 3-July 16. lished poet will work with visual artists who want to write poetry. Learn to 212 644 7171 www.artnet.com paint and collage with words, sculpt with sound and think of negative space equivalent to the silences between words. Enjoy the advantage of THE ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NEW YORK, Elizabeth V. Sullivan being an artist and thinking visually, which is plus to a writer. Your life Gallery, 241 Kings Highway, Sparkill NY, Galina Manikova, Connecting experiences are your palette, your pen is your brush. Write for yourself, to Wall New York June 4-June 29. 845-359-1263 preserve your history, for publication, or just for the joy of writing. Receive www.theartstudentsleague.org feedback through e mail and telephone conferences. Beginning and experi- enced writers welcome. Reasonable rates. Call Christine at 212-535-7352. 2/20 Gallery 220 West 16th St., NY, NY, Pato Diaz, “Valparaiso” Digital Painting through June 10. 212-807-8348 THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE www.patriciodiaz.com •Learn how to use your body corrrectly. •Improve your posture. FREE & GREEN: “The Complete Guide to New York Art Galleries: The •Achieve lasting results. Most Comprehensive Resource of its Kind” by Renée Phillips, is now pub- A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used success- lished on the Manhattan Arts International website for visitors to read Free. fuly for over a century. Learn how to use your body in a more efficient This Online Directory has detailed profiles of hundreds of New York City way which will have far-reaching benefits. It involves changing old habits Art Galleries, Private Dealers, Non-profit Exhibition Organizations, and learning new ones to last a lifetime. Please call for a private consulta- Museums, and Alternative Exhibition Spaces with links to their websites. tion and introductory lesson. Union Square studio, or house and office Contact names, style of art shown, artists shown, mission statement, year calls available. Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, photo analysis, established, how artists should approach them, and much more is provid- intro lesson plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. ed! Go to www.New-York-Art-Galleries.com and locate the New York art DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. 212-734-7875 gallery that is appropriate for you.

GELABERT STUDIOS GALLERY offers artists the opportunity to showcase G&S their work in a unique, elegant Upper West Side setting. Fully equipped gallery for rent Deadlines for September/October 2008 issue: on weekly or yearly basis. Top quality lighting. Call 212-874-7188 for rental color: August 6th; black & white: August 11th. details or visit our website: www.gelabertstudiosgallery.com. For ad rates, call (212) 861-6814 Gelabert Studios Gallery, 255 W. 86th St. (at Broadway), New York City 10024. or email [email protected]

WEST SIDE GROUP Continued from page 12 Definitely a cat to watch. Read features, interviews, etc. Then there was Rina Hunter, whose big Expressionist mixed media painting of a wild-eyed, toothy face, “Bandung Guy,” could from previous issues on our website be seen from bustling Broadway through the open gallery door, silently shouting out to passersby, as if to say, “Hey, c’mon www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com in––there’s all kindsa great stuff in here!” ––Byron Coleman 22 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Tradition and Originality in the Art of George J.D. Bruce hat makes an artist original, if not a the subject at hand when he paints a picture individual vision of a type that ultimately Wstriving after new forms of expression? such as “Black Cuillins,” one of his smallest transcends technique, even while applying Those who truly know would argue that it yet most exquisitely atmospheric oils on technique admirably, that brings alive paint- is actually the artist’s ability to imbue even paper. ings such as another small oil on paper the most traditional subjects and genres For there is no formula for capturing as called “Tiree Headland,” in which the with the stamp of an individual sensibility. vividly as Bruce does here the particular artist’s interpretation of yet another dramati- The paintings of George J.D. Bruce are a quality of light streaming through darkly cally overcast sky, rough breeze-blown grass- fine case in point, on the strength of the massed clouds and mist, illuminating the es, and frigid surf along the shoreline of a work he is showing at Agora Gallery, 530 tips of foliage in a manner that makes it deserted beach actually evokes a visceral West 25th Street, from June 3 through 24. sensation of the climate of the scene in the (Reception: Thursday, June 5, 6 to 8 PM.) viewer––at very least, this viewer. By all indications, Bruce, who was born Somewhat more decorous, yet no less in Great Britain in 1930, trained at the vividly limned, Bruce’s still life composi- Byam Shaw School of Drawing and tions, such as “Blue Flowers with Painting, and is a member of the Royal Redcurrants,” and “Roses in Fish Bowl,” Society of Portrait Painters in London is a demonstrate his ability to capture subtle traditional English gentleman. And the nuances of color and reflections of light on work that he produces in his studios in various surfaces. But even more significant is London and in the countryside of London the vibrant life that he brings to carefully invariably reflects such a strong identifica- arranged floral subjects, which do not have tion with the great art of the past that when the unpredictability, the sense of flux, and he was asked by an interviewer to name his “Tiree Headland” the spontaneity of natural settings. What most gratifying experience as an artist, he George J.D. Bruce does with these static immediately answered, “Experiencing the almost appear as though they are being subjects, however, besides capturing the Old Masters.” ignited by the sun and sending up smoke. individual vitality of each petal and leaf with Yet for all his reverence for tradition, The achievement of such effects requires a impressive verisimilitude, is to emphasize what makes Bruce’s own art relevant today gift of natural grace that cannot be learned their formal qualities every bit as emphati- is the freshness and immediacy that he even from the closest study of the Old cally as any abstract artist might. And it is brings to his interpretation of landscape and Masters. this ability to highlight the abstract attrib- still life subjects. Indeed, it is obvious that Indeed, although Bruce attributes his utes underlying the visible world that makes his vision is unmediated by academic consid- mastery of technique to being classically him a painter of rare and original gifts. erations and that he is responding directly to trained as an art student in the 1950s, it is ––Wilson Wong Artists Honor the Earth in Chelsea Group Show espite a stylistic diversity that belies composition exuded mystery and drama. angular qualities akin to the British painter Dtheir self-designation “New York Nadia Rivest also used the symbol of a Wyndham Lewis, which lend Atabalova’s oil Realism,” the artists in the recent group glamorous woman effectively in two oils of a mother and child “Madonna of the show “Life and Planet,” were united in entitled “Darina 1” and simply “Darina.” 21st Century” a formal appeal to match its honoring Earth Day and the environment, Striking sultry poses with her long, wheat- emotional resonance. Indeed, Atabalova’s at 532 Gallery, 532 West 25th Street in straw hair blowing over one eye, Darina formal qualities come to the forefront in the Chelsea. gave the impression of being a muse or a smaller still life “Eggs,” where a frypan and Gali, a well known painter from femme fatale. Yet a certain defensiveness in other utensils are the central motif. Kazakhstan who has long been concerned her demeanor, made explicit by the artist’s Leila Elias is a collageist of the first order, with the effects of nuclear fall-out on ability to evoke subtle facial expressions, creating evocative and meticulous composi- humanity showed two large oils on canvas made her appear more vulnerable than for- tions from photographic fragments and in which the refined beauty of his fantastic midable. other colorful elements that meld with a realist style, with its softly modeled forms Oil paint piled up in thick impasto and unique poetic grace. Here, Elias’s lyricism is and muted colors, contrasted sharply with scored linearly gave Olga Papkovithc’s paint- particularly noteworthy in “Butterfly grotesquely distorted human and animal fig- ing of an insect on sunflowers “Bee of Dream,” where a graceful silhouetted femi- ures showing the effects of mutation. These Octagonia” an almost relief-like effect. nine profile is the piece de resistance in a were counterbalanced by two smaller paint- Papkovithc has obviously learned much lyrically surreal composition that also ings of children interacting tenderly with from van Gogh’s brushwork, but employs it includes smaller figures, clocks, and the but- their pets, presenting the worst and best of in a less frenetic manner, in this strong can- terfly of the title. all possible worlds. vas, where gestural intensity conveys vital By contrast, Sofya Mirvis creates a lively Berik Kulmamirov, another accomplished energy rather than angst. synthesis of the surreal and the painterly in painter from Kazakhstan offered a large can- Aydar Khusainov, on the other hand, “Walking From Fate,” where disembodied vas called “Cold Summer of Caspian Sea,” employs radiant ribbon-like forms swirling legs and other figurative fragments merge in in which, in contrast to the ubiquitous around small, brightly colored silhouetted a gestural blur with swiftly sketched build- Warhol portraits, the figure of Marilyn figures in intricate compositions of a ings to create a sense of urban action and Monroe (or a least a dead-ringer for her) Byzantine complexity. In Khusainov’s oil on flux. Then there is Olga Radjapova, whose was employed for decidedly non-Pop pur- canvas “Alchemist of Love,” especially, the richly detailed still life “Red Flowers,” with poses. As she crouched near a small hut, a effect is as visually dazzling as the similarly its stylized vase offering a brilliant profusion camel sauntered by behind her; meanwhile, linear paintings of Friedensreich of blooms and juxtaposed by juicily painted in the foreground, an eagle hovered over a Hundertwasser, but even more fluid. fruits makes a modest yet elegant argument gnarled tree. Loaded with symbolism that Ogulkurban Atabalova, on the other for preserving all that is essential in our was not readily decipherable, Kulmamirov’s hand, practices a style of realism with subtle environment. ––Marie R. Pagano JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 23 Camaraderie, Competition, and Joy in CLWAC’s 2008 Survey he true value of a show like the ous forms of representation made a strong detail. By contrast, the sleepier atmosphere TCatharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club’s showing. Lucille Berill Paulsen’s “Saint of nocturnal suburbia is evoked in “Night 2008 Members’ Exhibition, seen recently at Karin,” a small, meticulously painted oil in Walkers,” an oil by Joan Hoffman Coll of the Broome Street Gallery, 498 Broome an elaborate arched frame of a young someone walking two dogs down a quiet Street, is the opportunity it affords to view a woman with a pretty, clean-cut countenance street where the cozy yellow windows of wide variety of diverse works. Here is “art and a halo encircling her shiny, shampooed- shadowy houses glow from behind tall, shel- for art’s sake” in the most literal sense of the looking hair simultaneously suggested a reli- tering hedges, the scene lent a pleasing term, a veritable bazaar of diverse works in gious icon and a contemporary parent’s ide- verisimilitude by the artist’s way with many mediums, as familiar and new artists alization of a justifiably beloved offspring. chiaroscuro. Then there is Dora Atwater vie for one’s attention in a spirit of com- Two very different approaches to a similar Millikin, who transforms an obscure country bined camaraderie and competition, subject were seen in Jeanette Dick’s intimate road with telephone poles and small nonde- amounting to a veritable aesthetic bazaar rear-view of seated female nude in an script houses here and there into a creamy not unlike that provided by a good art fair. accomplished pastel technique and Okki semi-abstract composition reminiscent of As always, the show Nicholas de Stael, its was juried, but while subtle color harmonies that is most certainly a and smooth yet palpable significant draw for the textures offering much artists, the judges’ opportunity for choices should have no visual/tactile delectation. undue influence on the In “Amanda” Gaile discerning viewer with Snow Gibbs gives us a aesthetic preferences of radiant and insightful oil his or her own. For of a wholesome young while prizes are general- woman wearing a mod- ly merited, artistic taste est maternity frock and is invariably subjective cradling her pregnant and the wide member- stomach. Elizabeth ship of this venerable Torak’s “Sunday women’s art organiza- Morning” is a warmly tion, named for an affectionate double-por- American scholar and trait of two portly philanthropist who was African American church the lone woman among ladies enjoying a hearty the 106 founding mem- breakfast of pancakes, bers of The painted in a robust, Metropolitan Museum bouncy manner that of Art, provides some- owes something to thing for everyone. Rubens. And while they One frequent exhibitor, the sculptor Whang’s considerably larger oil of a dread- are not exactly portraits in any traditional Gloria Spevacek makes this point splendidly locked young male seated with his back to sense, Janet Indick’s “Eve & Adam,” com- with “Fatherhood Penguin,” a bronze of a the viewer, a skateboard resting against his panion assemblages of masks, artificial fruits, male avian protecting an egg that should legs. fake flowers, a rubber snake, a necktie, and resonate with anyone who saw the hit In a somewhat less realistic figurative style other found objects arranged on totemic nature film “March of the Penguins,” nar- akin to the cartoon-influenced 3-D assem- cardboard tubes create characters as fanciful rated by Morgan Freeman. But beyond its blages of Red Grooms, a brightly painted as some of Saul Steinberg’s witty graphic popular appeal, Spevacek’s treatment of sim- bas relief by Cary Boone Nelson depicted permutations. plified animal anatomy should also provide seven mature women seated on a long One could go on indefinitely describing another kind of pleasure to viewers with a bench, as though waiting at a bus stop or in highlights of this show, among them: Jean sophisticated appreciation for abstract form. a train station, each figure possessed of a Kroeber’s gracefully wraithlike wood man- The latter category of viewer should also strong individual character. Equally evoca- zanite sculpture “Curvatura,” its fluid form appreciate Jinx Lindenauer’s “Cathedral tive in a more boldly generalized manner is suggesting a nature sprite; a tiny, exquisite Rock,” an abstract marble sculpture that, “Stormy Evening,” a largish oil in a palette pastel called “Peering into the Past” by while relatively intimate in scale, projects an dominated by luminous purple hues by Margaret Williams McGowan in which a authoritative presence, while fanciers of Elaine Lavalle, in a which several shadowy tattered gray sweatshirt hanging on a hook more figurative tendencies will most proba- figures traverse a hazy city street amid glow- conjures up an almost ghostly presence; a bly be impressed by Marsha Tosk’s bronze ing traffic lights, the entire composition large watercolor by Randy Globus of two of a lissome female nude, “The Reflecting conjuring up an almost Turner-esque atmos- scarecrow-like figures with bird houses for Pool,” its title referring to the figure’s self pheric mystery. heads, the empty sleeves of one clutching a smitten downward glance, as though admir- Once again, a similar subject is treated in bouquet of dried flowers, standing together ing her own image ala Narcissus from her a different manner in “My New York,” a in a field, in a deadpan composition as sur- perch on a rock. watercolor by Ann Chaddock of a rainy real as anything by Rene Magritte. The democratic nature of visual expres- night in the Times Square theater district, in An embarrassment of riches for a critic, sion in this show also came across in the which pedestrians with umbrellas weaving this most recent CLWAC Members’ complementary contrasts between the styles among among city traffic under billboards Exhibition offered a plethora of pleasures of several other artists as well. As always in and neon signs are depicted in a style at for the viewer. an organization so steeped in tradition, vari- once spontaneous and filled with loving ––Byron Coleman

24 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 ART ONLINE Hendrik Smit Possibly the Last All-Out, Balls-Out “Action Painter” aving put aside his brushes some time his large canvases with an opaque projector. especially since the artist himself takes great Hback, the Dutch painter Hendrik Smit Smit, however, improvises his paintings pains to avoid recognizable imagery or even paints directly with his hands. Unlike so from scratch in the manner of a jazz musi- the slightest allusion to anything outside the many other things in today’s novelty-driven, cian. In this regard, even though they show sphere of his adamantly abstract canvases. publicity-hungry art world, this is not a no stylistic similarities, Smit’s working Speaking of spheres, some of Smit’s most gimmick or a bid for attention on Smit’s process can be more readily compared to spectacular recent paintings are a series of part, but a serious attempt to involve him- Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, for its tondos, the round shape of which makes self in a more intimate and visceral manner directness and the manner in which his liter- their dimensions appear limitless and with the act of painting. And it succeeds ally “hands-on” technique (as Christine van emphasizes the swirling expansiveness of admirably on evidence of the paintings Stralen, of the Art Projects Bureau, Almere, their forms, that––if the artist will once Smit exhibits regularly at again forgive the writer for Montserrat Gallery, 547 “Rorschaching” actual West 27th Street, in Chelsea, images onto his determined- and the even larger number ly nonobjective composi- of his paintings available for tions––suggest brilliantly col- viewing on his website: orful land-masses and bodies www.hendriksmit.nl. of water on the surface of a Indeed, Smit’s use of his global orb (at least the most hands rather than brushes ambitious of subjects, if a gives his abstract canvases a subject must be suggested to unique gestural thrust, a sig- help the reader visualize nature style unlike that of any some of the superficial char- other artist at work today. On acteristics of these paintings). first acquaintance with Smit’s Taking the body of Smit’s dynamically rhythmical com- work as a whole, rectangular positions, with their dramati- and in the round alike, what cally splashy, surging, rhyth- the vitality and immediacy of mic forms and brilliant pri- his oeuvre projects most maries often juxtaposed with insistently is the ongoing fleshy pinks and other com- struggle and ultimate tri- plementary hues, one is ini- umph of the creative act, as tially tempted to make com- the artist attacks the canvas parisons to de Kooning for with paint-smeared hands the most obvious reasons: (only occasionally does he both are Dutchmen through resort to the palette knife to and through (anyone who further articulate certain ever spent time with de areas), creating cataclysmic Kooning, as this writer had shapes that appear almost as the good fortune to do once, though wrested from within a few years before his death, “2008/0.nr. 4 2008” it rather than imposed upon can attest that he never lost it––so inevitable and organic his accent); both work on a heroic scale put- the Netherlands, called it in a text repro- do their sinuous permutations appear. ting the full force of the body behind their duced on Smit’s website) puts him “right To again quote Smit’s fellow countryman strokes; both are brilliant colorists and inside the painting,” where Pollock always and spiritual ancestor de Kooning, “There’s employ bold forms that vacillate between claimed he wanted to be, as well as for its no way of looking at a work of art by itself; the lyrical and the brutal; both show an radical departure from traditional practice. it’s not self-evident––it needs a history, it acute awareness of and reverence for the It helps, of course, that Smit is more skill- needs a lot of talking about; it’s part of a great European tradition from which they ful with his hands than most other painters whole man’s life.” And surely this is true of sprang, even while challenging its orthodox- are with their brushes, articulating heroic Smit, whose work can only be understood ies. forms, smeared and manipulated with his as a continuum of gestures that, from one Where Smit differs significantly from de fingers, that veer across his large canvases canvas to another, give us if not the literal Kooning, however, is in his absolutely with breathtaking velocity and force, thrash- content of the man’s life, the imprint of his extemporaneous way of working. According ing like drunken cobras, like the splayed character conveyed with emphatic energy. to his longtime friend and art dealer, Allan entrails of eviscerated mastodons, or (while After viewing Smit’s website, this writer Stone, who was an executor for his estate, it is impossible to imagine Smit ever stoop- was put in mind of something he once de Kooning “would try out a ‘spontaneous’ ing to such cheap theatrics) like the paint- heard a well known British rock and roll passage on vellum many times until he splashed nude models that Eves Klein used singer exclaim to his fellow musicians as achieved the desired effect, and then he to roll across unstretched lengths of canvas they came offstage, dripping sweat and grin- would meticulously reproduce that passage laid out on the floor. ning after a particularly rollicking perform- on canvas.” The same was true of Franz One can only apologize for the luridness ance: “That gig was really balls-out, mates!” Kline, another Abstract Expressionist often of the imagery that Hendrik Smit’s expan- “Balls out” seems a most appropriate mistaken for an “action painter,” who made sively energetic compositions inspire in the accolade for the paintings of Hendrik Smit. small ink sketches on the pages of a tele- writer straining to come up with similes to phone book and actually traced them onto match the visual impact of his paintings–– ––Ed McCormack

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 25 ART ONLINE Alphonse Lane Brings “Nature Morte” to Strange New Life n his book “Objects on a Table,” Guy phic paintings are “Windmill Flower,” and make up the composition. The two taller IDavenport states, “That the kinship of “Dying Limbs,” where the plants and their plants inhabit blue and purple vases, respec- still life with still life down through history vessels merge visually to suggest single fig- tively. Waving their fronds like arms, they is greater than that of landscape with land- ures gesturing dramatically. Giving the lie to appear to fawn over the smaller plant in a scape, or portrait with portrait, lies at the Davenport’s theory of sameness, Lane dif- squat yellow pot between them. While the center of its mystery,” and adds, fers significantly from earlier still life latter sits self-contained, like a baby Buddha, “Reiteration is a privilege of still life denied painters, such as the Dutch masters or its odd blue and red petals and symmetrical many other modes.” Morandi, in that he seems less concerned leaves flourishing, the other two seem to Although Davenport’s theory is interest- with the play of light on surfaces or formal shrivel and wane, as though drained by their ing, he’s obviously doting concern. unfamiliar with the While such highly original still interpretations life compositions of are admittedly Alphonse Lane, an subjective and artist who holds an probably touch M.F.A. in Painting upon meanings from the never intended Pennsylvania by the artist, it Academy of Fine seems safe to sur- Arts and exhibits at mise that each Monkdogz Urban viewer who scru- Art, in Chelsea, tinizes Lane’s whose work can be work will come seen on his website: up with equally alphonselane.net. farfetched con- For Lane, who clusions of his or works in a meticu- her own. So sub- lous and pristine tly evocative are style in oil on these paintings panel, objects on a that one can’t table invariably take help reading all a turn for the surre- manner of things al. Aside from occa- into them. And sional departures Lane obviously from his usual for- does nothing to mat––an intriguing discourage such composition of imaginative forays floating figurative on the part of the fragments and sym- viewer when he bols called “Sage of “Olive Mist” names a compo- Crystals”; a moody stylized landscape called juxtapositions than with the emotional reso- sition comprised of three objects, the central “Fallen Sun Flower”––most of his composi- nance of inanimate objects. one tall and red with pink petals sprouting tions center on one or more floral arrange- This is not to imply that Lane is neglect- out of it like tongues of flame, “Fire Vase,” ments lined up frontally against a back- ful of formal values; quite the contrary: it is or titles another composition, “These ground of a single, pale hue. However, the his exquisite sensitivity to form, spatial rela- Flowers Never Die.” petals and fronds of the flowers often resem- tionships, and subtleties of tone and color Something of a mysterious departure for ble tendrils; their leaves possess a serpentine that lends his compositions their underlying its outdoor setting is a painting called “Blue sinuousness; their colors appear to parody tension. On one level, his paintings can Light,” in which hearty nocturnal blooms in rather than imitate nature: odd pastel hues, appear as austerely arranged and uninflected a stout vase are seen against a starry sky, tending toward soft, smoky yellows, olive in style as those of William Bailey, another seemingly trumpeting their vespertine glo- greens, mauves, and baby blues. contemporary painter who invests still life ries from their shapely horns. By contrast, in The vases and pots that Lane paints are with peculiarly suggestive qualities. But “Red Ocher Vase,” small, colorful flowers often in similarly offbeat colors and their while Bailey’s tabletop line-ups of China on a tall vine, rising out of a vessel shaped shapes can be just as fanciful, as seen in cups, canisters, clayware, and the occasional like a human heart, appear to sizzle like “Exotic Vases,” where pink and pale violet egg, smoothly painted in subdued hues, sparks on the fuse of a bomb. vessels with curved handles rival for their have reminded some critics of metaphorical Indeed, it is this sense of imminence, of baroque contours the bizarre plant forms cityscapes, Lane’s paintings are all the more something strange about to happen, and in that they hold. Lane’s apparently imaginary remarkable for his ability to imbue an equal- happening, to create a metaphor for some- plant species sometimes suggest alien life ly restrained technique with a deeper psy- thing else, that imbues the ostensibly simple forms of an almost sinister sensuality, as flora chological suggestiveness by virtue of his paintings of Alphonse Lane with a vital take on the qualities of fauna, assuming pos- fanciful subject matter. complexity which transcends the connota- tures that can seem tortured, wounded, In Lane’s painting “Olive Mist,” for tions of passivity and morbidity inherent in even malign. example, there is the suggestion of a familial the French term for still life, “nature Two of his most overtly anthropomor- relationship between the three objects that morte.” ––Ed McCormack

26 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 ART ONLINE Elizabeth Delson (1932-2005): The Rich Legacy of a Working Artist “ hey are landscapes in my mind, per- Their colors are indeed “vibrant,” but far painterly, in terms of being fully fleshed Thaps not immediately evident to all; from being “ almost gaudy,” as she out, as seen in her color viscosity etching the colors are vibrant, almost gaudy,” the described them. Painted in oil on paper “The Deep,” an undersea marine scene fea- painter and printmaker Elizabeth Delson primed with white gesso that serves as an turing a large, realistically rendered fish wrote about a series of paintings she was integral element in the composition, they that appears to float outside the rectangle working on in the Spring of 2002, three employ gestural strokes that intertwine like containing its undersea environment, one years before her death. “I wonder how they multicolored flames. Generous areas of of her most accomplished and popular will fare; it is like sending children out into white ground around the clustered strokes images. As a printmaker Delson, who had the world, not knowing if they will be seen at the center let air into the composition an etching studio and press in the family’s as ugly ducklings or elegant swans.” and emphasize the calligraphic grace and house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was espe- Excerpted from a longer muscular plastici- cially prolific and adventurous. The Print journal entry at the beginning ty of the ener- Gallery on her site boasts some 306 exam- of the comprehensive website getically flaring ples, mostly etchings, along with litho- (www.atalierliz.com) that is forms. graphs and serigraphs. She employed a vari- maintained to keep her artistic Although ety of techniques, including aquatint and legacy alive, this brief quote Delson described inkless intaglio to lend her prints tactile speaks volumes about of them as qualities that are especially appealing in Elizabeth Delson’s devotion “landscapes in small yet technically dazzling prints such as to her artistic vocation. my mind,” these “An Apple a Day,” a witty play on the Over a fifty-one year career, paintings appear theme of Adam and Eve, and “Exotic Little which began in earnest after more concerned Jungle,” both with raised, inkless areas that her first child was born in with the under- create ornate frames within the picture 1960 and she gave up her lying energies space for her deftly drawn human and ani- work as a textile designer for and essences of mal figures. fine art, while coping with all nature than with Again, but in a different manner, the newfound joys and chores the lay of the Delson’s use of color relief and intaglio of motherhood, Delson sent land. And, techniques in her “Twelve Tribes of Israel scores of paintings and prints indeed, some Suite,” combining monochromatic figures out into the world. Some of works in the and elements of landscape with red Hebrew them won prizes in juried series, such as lettering, results in a tactile richness that exhibitions or found their way “Metamorphosis enhances the series’ symbolic significance, into important private and “Metamorphoses V: All That Jazz” V: All That Jazz” putting it on a par with the best Judaica public collections, including those of The appears decidedly figurative, with dancing prints of Ben Shahn and Leonard Baskin. Brooklyn Museum and Hunter College. forms suggesting the angularly stylized Along with her ability to invest enduring As a young woman from Plainfield, New nudes in Picasso’s biblical, mythological, and symbolic Jersey, recently graduated from Smith “Les Demoiselles scenes with contemporary freshness, College, Delson enrolled in Pratt Institute, d’Avignon,” albeit as seen in her “Metamorphoses in Brooklyn, where she studied drawing in juicier gestural Suite” and “Signs of the Zodiac” with Philip Guston and Richard Lindner. strokes and brighter series, Delson was able to impart Both were strong personalities and most hues more akin to monumental qualities to fleeting likely confirmed her belief in her artistic de Kooning. moments of daily life in a series of calling; but neither left a lasting influence These works are a modest yet superb miniature prints on her mature style, which, in her abstract departure from endowing romping felines, avuncu- paintings, has an organic energy and a ges- Delson’s earlier lar owls, children at play, reclining tural strength akin to Abstract Abstract nudes, a slice of pie on a plate, and Expressionism, and in her more figurative Expressionist oils, in other humble subjects with a pres- prints often reveals an almost Matisse-like which tightly ence recalling the ancient Asian linear fluidity. enjambed areas of masters. Much to her credit, from the beginning strong but muted One especially outstanding exam- Delson seemed to recognize the distinctly color appear to ple of Elizabeth Delson’s ability to different characteristics of her two medi- allude to landscape, ennoble an everyday subject is a ums, never attempting to merge or synthe- still life and figures, “The Deep” medium-size color etching in a size them for the sake of achieving a super- their sensually long, narrow horizontal format ficial stylistic consistency. Someone once swelling contours creating dynamic spatial called “By the Blue, Blue Sea,” which has said, “Style is character,” and that alone tensions. As she continued to paint, all the grace and beauty of a classical frieze. seems sufficient to unite the two aspects of Delson’s forms opened up, unlocked, Here, several linear nude male and female Delson’s creativity under the auspices of her became less convoluted, acquiring the ease, figures printed in sepia ink cavort gracefully singular aesthetic sensibility. velocity and grace of a mature style. Even on a stretch of intricately stippled sand, Among her paintings, of which there are while remaining true to the innate charac- while the tide rolls in behind them in sinu- 83 in the virtual gallery on her website (the teristics of their medium, retaining its pal- ous blue swirls, orchestrated by Delson in remaining 28 paintings listed in the pable physicality and abstract autonomy, her as memorably watery a manner as Painting Catalog are in private collections paintings grew closer in spirit to her prints Hokusai’s masterpiece “The Great Wave.” unavailable for photographing), the works for the fluidity of their forms. One feels quite comfortable placing that Delson refers to in the aforementioned Conversely, it would appear that some of Elizabeth Delson in such exhalted company. journal entry are characteristically vigorous. her prints simultaneously became more ––Ed McCormack JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 27 ART ONLINE Passions, Moral and Otherwise, “100 New York Painters”: Abound in A.B. Bradshaw’s Candidates for the Canon Virtual Galleries hat Cynthia Maris Dantzic, long- Ttime Professor of Art Long hile Pop and Minimalism Island University and award-winning Wwere the major art move- author of numerous art textbooks, is ments of the 1960s, there was a also a visual artist makes her hand- vital countercurrent––appropriate- some new coffee table volume “100 ly rooted in the counterculture, New York Painters” all the more and most particularly in the psy- worthy of one’s attention. chedelic poster movement––bent Like other doubly gifted painter / on reviving more visionary and writers such as Elaine de Kooning romantic styles. The artists who and Fairfield Porter, Dantzic under- adhered to this alternative move- stands her subject from a more inti- ment revered Aubrey Beardsley, mate perspective than most other William Blake, Gustave Dore, critics. Even more important, she does not fall back on jargon or Albrecht Durer, and other great mistake obscurity for profundity. Writing in clear, well-construct- draftsmen who had fallen out of ed sentences, she offers succinct biographical sketches of the favor with the advent of the avant artists, as well as insightful comments on their work that illumi- garde. And while many vanished nate, rather than obfuscate, the book’s profusion of beautiful with the drug culture, others have color reproductions. stood their ground long enough “You will encounter a number of household names and iconic to see the species of figuration “The Kiss” museum-owned works known far beyond the confines of New that they championed vindicated in the more permissive aesthetic cli- York,” Dantzic tells us in her introduction. “These will be sup- mate of Postmodernism. plemented by less familiar, even relatively unknown names, yet By far one of the more gifted of these contemporary draftsmanly stal- not, to my mind, of lesser merit.” warts is A.B. Bradshaw, whose work can viewed on two websites: The book, which is arranged alphabetically, rather by order of www.originalgalleryart.com and www.bradshawgunengraver.com. prominence or stylistic sympathy, places artists at different career The first site features Bradshaw’s fine art; the second centers on what he levels in a random proximity that would be unlikely in a gallery considers to be his commercial work as a professional gun engraver and setting. The overall parity attests to the author’s taste and makes engraver of jewelry in precious metals. her point splendidly. However, like his fellow engraver (and commercial printer) William Although Alex Katz is represented by the familiar large can- Blake––as well as the refreshingly down-to-earth (even when sky-high!) vases for which critic Irving Sandler coined the term “hard edge hippie graphic aces of the San Francisco poster movement––Bradshaw realism,” early in his career Katz exhibited freestanding cut-outs apparently makes little distinction between the calling of the artist and of friends in the art world. More recently, Susan Sills has made craftsman / artisan. That he brings an almost equal degree of craft and lifesize cut-outs of figures from famous paintings the mainstay of creative imagination to the task of engraving an ornate image of a her career, expanding the possibilities of the form in unexpected mastodon onto the bore of a gun as to creating a fine art copperplate ways, ultimately making it her own. print, wood engraving, or oil painting of a neo-surreal fantasy scene, Wolf Kahn and Richard Mayhew both came of age among makes both sites equally worth savoring. the Abstract Expressionists, but applied their gestural vigor and Like Blake, the forbearer with whom he has the most in common coloristic independence to landscape painting. Marcia Clark’s (although the settings in which he situates some of his figures recall the majestic Arctic landscapes achieve their own dynamic synthesis of bucolic British landscapes of Samuel Palmer and shades of Hieronymus the gestural and the actual, and Stephanie Rauschenbusch Bosch haunt some of his more hellish visions), Bradshaw favors vision- employs the grid to “push” her European and domestic land- ary battles between demons and angels, symbolizing the conflicts in scapes “toward abstraction.” human nature between the forces of light and darkness. Among the more familiar names are: Richard Anuszkiewicz, The self-protective irony so fashionable in much contemporary art Lennart Anderson, Benny Andrews, Donald Baechler, Will seems to have no place in Bradshaw’s hierarchy of concerns, even if his Barnet, Jack Beal, Siri Berg, Bernard Chaet, Charles Cajori, eschewal of it may cause some to see him as naive, or even a bit batty in Chuck Close, Harvey Dinnerstein, Lois Dodd, Richard Estes, the manner of the aforementioned Blake. Passion is paramount in all of Janet Fish, Eric Fischl, Audrey Flack, Jane Freilicher, Bob his work, whether it be the morally indignant passion of the cartoon-like Goodnough, Yvonne Jacquette, Jack Levine, Robert Mangold, drawing “Progress of Man”; the romantic passion depicted in “The Philip Pearlstein, and Paul Resika, Faith Ringgold, Dorothea Kiss”; or the unabashed eroticism of watercolors like “Long Shot,” a Rockburne, William Scharf, Pat Steir, and George Tooker. luminous watercolor of a lissome female pool player in a flimsy see- Some of the up-and comers are: Kelynn Zatarain Alder, through negligee and tall black fetish boots baring a rear-view of but- Emma Amos, Jane Bolmeier, Richmond Burton, Ellen Cibula, tocks and a flash of pudendum as she leans determinedly over a pool Lisa Collado, Judy Cuttler, Lisa Corinne Davis, Catherine table. Other prints such as “Fellatio” are even more explicit depictions Redmond, Marie Roberts, Shunji Sakuyama, Johan Sellenraad, of sexual couplings executed with a healthy robustness and impressive Laura Schiavina, Posoon Park Sung, Barbara Takenaga, Vivian technical finesse, which should offend no adult person––except perhaps Tsao, Bob Tomlinson, Audrey Ushenko,Gian Berto Vanni, Ella those who have religious objections to such subjects or harbor lamenta- Yang, and Darryl Zudeck. ble hangups concerning sexual expression. “Admittedly, many, even many of the best, will not be found in Divided into several virtual galleries devoted to a plethora of subjects, these pages,” Dantzic writes. “I must (and do) acknowledge the ranging from the sensual to the spiritual, the sacred to the profane, A.B. large number of those who might as well have been included.” Bradshaw’s main website opens with a prominently posted WARNING Nonetheless, ‘100 New York Artists” offers a lively, if to the “easily offended,” advising “parental guidance and viewer discre- arguable, overview of what makes this city, in Dantzic’s words, tion.” Those with no qualms about proceeding further will encounter the “Art Capital of the contemporary world.” much beauty and many mature pleasures. ––Byron Coleman ––J. Sanders Eaton 28 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Kenneth Dinkel’s Abstract Paintings Make Their New York Debut at Berkeley Gallery ike the German artist Gerhard Richter, Indeed, two of his paintings actually vases in the exhibition and “Pantanemo,” a Lthe upstate New York painter Kenneth verge on a peculiarly postmodern tendency marinescape only available for viewing on Dinkel works in two distinctly different for which I once coined the oxymoronic yet his website (Kennethdinkel.com). For while modes. But while Richter’s fuzzy photoreal- arguably apt term “abstract realism”: the former work consists of radiant rainbow ism and streaked gestural abstractions are “Magnolia,” where pink buds and pale bands of color running horizontally across both conceptual conceits ––pictures of pic- green vines are set schematically against a the canvas, the latter is a similarly spare tures, so to speak–– Dinkel’s lyrical land- pale blue sky, and “Infinite Dream,” where depiction of sky, sea, and sand with an scapes and rhythmic abstractions are faithful tiny points of light enliven a velvety, deeper almost identical composition. representations of what he considers to be blue expanse. Only their overall composi- Because most of Dinkel’s abstract paint- outer and inner reality. tions set them apart as more consciously for- ings are overall compositions (the one just Dinkel’s gift for boiling landscape sub- mal explorations than his landscapes. discussed being a rare exception), it would jects ––such as a sunset over a beach, a Other oils on canvas, such as “Mardi be far too superficial to liken certain individ- stretch of ual works marshlands such as “The at the foot Dress” and of Bass “Fireworks,” River, or despite their cloud for- densely lay- mations ered and over snow- somewhat shrouded atypical moun- splashes and tains–– drips, to down to a Jackson few essen- Pollock. tial shapes, However, a depicted far more with solid accurate clarity and comparison vibrant might be color, made to the could art of Mark remind Tobey, a con- one of “Rush Hour” temporary of Marsden Pollock’s Harley’s rugged distillations of the Maine Gras” and “Rush Hour,” are more purely whose intimate and contemplative “white coast. (In fact, it was on a visit to Maine, abstract, with their even more codified over- writing,” informed by Asian calligraphy, is about ten years ago, that Dinkel, then a all compositions of intricately meshed cur- more akin to the graceful rhythms of contractor by trade, first got the urge to sive strokes swirling like feathers in a storm. Dinkel’s generally more deliberate mark- paint.) However, his style is less blunt, more Yet Dinkel’s penchant for the literal still making technique. earnestly realistic than that of the earlier comes across in the way the buoyant shapes Like Tobey before him, Dinkel lives painter, and his approach is probably more and festive red, orange, and neon green somewhat apart from the clamorous cultural methodical as well, since he claims to be hues in “Mardi Gras” reflect its title, as well capitol that is Manhattan––although the able to visualize each picture from start to as in how the more convoluted forms and upstate hamlet of Armonk, New York, is finish. dominant blue hues of “Rush Hour” sug- admittedly nowhere near as remote as Dinkel’s abstractions, however, are more gest hectic urban rhythms. Tobey’s Pacific Northwest. As in his prede- intuitive affairs, involving a great deal of Besides reminding one that the afore- cessors case, this could account to some improvisation and discovery, and it is these mentioned Marsden Hartley also vacillated degree for Dinkel’s independence from the that the curator Bob Keiber has chosen to between landscape and abstract composi- trendy influences that were rampant in the showcase in the artist’s first New York City tions, the thematic literalness of Dinkel’s heyday of Abstract Expressionism and con- solo exhibition at Berkeley Gallery, Berkeley abstractions calls to mind other pioneering tinue to hold sway in an even more ampli- College, 3 East 43rd Street, from July 1 American modernists like Joseph Stella, who fied way today. In rural Armonk, where he through 31. (Reception: July 9, from 5:30 based a nonobjective painting on the gaudy lives quietly with his wife Nancy, an aspiring to 7:30 PM.) lights of Coney Island, and Arthur Dove, portrait painter, and his two young sons, he What Dinkel’s abstractions share with his who, in one of his most famous paintings, finds inspiration for his landscapes and, landscapes is a sense of straightforward sought a visual equivalent for the sound of apparently, a serenity that nurtures the specificity, as though he endeavors to endow foghorns. inwardness of his abstractions as well. less tangible qualities with the same struc- Although Dinkel’s abstractions often That neither of his two modes of expres- tural solidity as things one can see. At the focus on specifics, he captures the essences sion seems at all beholden to fashion strikes same time, each composition seems to be of his subjects, probes their underlying prin- one as being much to his credit and makes based on internalized structures that emerge ciples, via the rhythms that emanate from Kenneth Dinkel’s New York solo debut of from, or out of, universal rhythms such as them, rather than their external forms. Yet abstractions at Berkeley Gallery an exhibi- those of autumn leaves blowing in a breeze very definite parallels can be drawn between tion well worth seeing. or distant stars winking in a nocturnal sky. “Reflections,’ one of his larger abstract can- ––Ed McCormack

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 29 The “Art Fantastique” of Michèle Vincent at Montserrat Gallery he skeletons of ruined cathedrals over- de resistance of Vincent’s painting is a paintings, Tgrown with fantastic foliage sometimes shredding piece of cloth pinned to a plaster where shelter lovers in a state of metamorphosis wall that is crumbling in places, with the they are from human to plant form in the meticu- bricks showing through and plants growing engulfed lously detailed oils of the French painter through the cracks with insects swarming by Michèle Vincent, whose work is on view in around them. This tattered cloth opens like baroque the year around salon exhibition and also a window on a nocturnal realm where a configu- featured in a solo exhibition entitled “The beautiful nude woman, waist-deep in a body rations Fantastic Universe,” at Montserrat of water, appears to be embraced by a phan- among Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27th tom lover who half-vanishes into the dark ruins Street, from May 27 through June 14. blue background. whose (Champagne reception Thursday, May 29th, Other works in the exhibition, all painted erosions from 6 to 8 PM.) between 2000 and 2008, are equally evoca- Painting by Michèle Vincent and fis- Although self-taught, Vincent cites tive. In one, a handsome man with long sures reveal glimpses of clear blue sky, as Salvador Dali and Leonor Fini as influences. blond hair who looks like the warrior hero swarms of birds swoop off into the distance But whether she is aware of his work or not, of a Harlequin women’s romance novel in visionary compositions whose complex one can just as readily discern a strong, per- stands under the arches of a cathedral that symbology, known only to the artist herself, haps intuitive, kinship with the American soars skyward in rhythmic reverberations provokes a veritable riot of imaginative spec- fantastic realist Ivan Albright, who painted reminiscent of M.C. Escher, as he holds ulation in the mind of the viewer. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” for the aloft a beautiful woman whose nudity is Besides the painters she admires, Vincent, Hollywood film based on Wilde’s novel, in only half hidden by lush explosions of flow- who has been widely exhibited and honored her penchant for decaying surfaces, rendered ers and feathers far more extravagant than in France, Italy and the U.S., also cites an in loving detail. the plumage of any Las Vegas showgirl. eclectic list of literary influences that Indeed, Vincent’s painting, “The Old Indeed, on closer inspection, these floral ele- includes Baudelaire, Verlaine Lautreamont, Fabric on the Wall” is every bit as striking ments and avian adornments actually appear Poe, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for its detailed depiction of decrepitness as to be consuming her flesh, as her handler along with other enthusiasms ranging from Albright’s famous canvas “That which I holds her up like a giant bouquet, and slen- the classical music to the rock group Dire Should Have Done, I Did Not Do.” der vines of flora take on a life of their own, Straits. All apparently feed into and inform However, while the American painter’s snake-dancing sinuously up toward the light the unique brand of gothic surrealism that composition centered on a moldering funer- streaming from the crown of the cathedral. she refers to as “Art Fantastique.” al wreath on an old, battered door, the piece The two lovers are revisited in other ––Maurice Taplinger Akihiko Iwanami’s Commitment to Eternal Virtues and Verities ll the publicity surrounding the Takashi abstractions appear to extend the tradition mutable as molten lava. He employs the AMurakami retrospective at the Brooklyn of modernism exemplified by the painters chromatic clarity of mineral colors most Museum can only serve to further obscure associated with the Gutai group, whose glowingly in the recent paintings such the fact that some Japanese artists are work awakened many Americans to the “Untitled, Blue” and “Untitled, Red,” inspired by things deeper and more subtle power of postwar Japanese art––not only as where the apportionment of space is con- than anime, manga, science fiction charac- a foreign branch of “action painting” and summately Japanese, with the dominant hue ters, and video games. set against expansive areas of “empti- Long after art that is beholden to cute ness.” In Iwanami’s case, however, the cartoon characters and other aspects of ostensibly bare spaces in the composi- popular culture has run its inevitable tion are invariably underpinned by a course, however, it seems certain that the submerged grid, often primed with work of Akihiko Iwanami will endure, metallic leaf, that serves as an organizing judging from the paintings seen in his armature for the freedom of his brush most recent exhibition, which ran work, which can vary with the mere through May 31 at Caelum Gallery, twist of a wrist from sinuous calligraphic 508-526 West 26th Street, in Chelsea. “Untitled Red” grace to a painterly muscularity reminis- Having followed Iwanami’s work for cent of de Kooning. more than a decade and having had the predecessor of performance art, but as an Although they never resort to overt pleasure of meeting with him on more than autonomous movement with its own descriptiveness, Akihiko Iwanami’s composi- one occasion to discuss his aesthetic ideas, it indigenous origins––when they showed at tions often appear to allude, if not directly was heartening but not unexpected to see the then influential Martha Jackson Gallery, to landscape, to the eternal forces and that he has remained steadfast in his commit- in New York City in 1958. Being an artist essences that underlie all of nature, as well as ment to combining the spontaneous velocity of the postmodern period, however, and to the infinite spaces and mysterious misty of ancient Zen literati ink painting with the even more adamant about cleaving to his atmospheres in traditional Asian scroll paint- aggressive scale and untrammeled energy of roots in a climate auspiciously hospitable to ings. With their luminous colors and surg- mainstream abstraction. And the synthesis multiculturalism, Iwanami works not in oils ing forms, partaking of a wide variety of that he forges strikes me as much more or acrylics, but in traditional mineral pig- exuberant and vigorous mark-making tech- innately authentic than that of the Abstract ments on paper. niques, they are expansive, ambitious, and Expressionists, who adopted techniques of These pure, natural materials imbue his magnificent in a manner that makes much dripping, splashing, and spattering that origi- paint surfaces with an almost contradictory other art that is currently being touted for nated in Asia many centuries earlier. sense of solidity and translucency, making its fashionable attributes seem transient and Indeed, Iwanami’s big, bold gestural them appear at once marble-like and as trivial by comparison. ––Ed McCormack 30 GALLERY&STUDIO JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 Joe Chierchio’s Atmospheric City of Dreams ohn Russell once called New York City without a natty fedora or at very least a flop- ‘KEY LARGO’ with LAUREN BACALL.” J“one of the supreme subjects of our cen- py cap like one of the bootblacks wears as Not only the romance of young couples in tury.” And certainly the great and ever- he buffs one of the customer’s brogans love but of the city itself, as in yet another increasing number of painters, photogra- ––possibly in time to a tune like the one work called “Milkman,” in which, having phers, poets, novelists, and filmmakers who being blown on a trumpet by a hepcat in a parked his immaculate white truck at the have fallen under the city’s spell attests to its t-shirt and stingy-brim bebop hat high up in curb, the character of the title, carrying a fascination. Few, however, have given us as a tenement window with a pigeon perched rack of bottles, ascends the stoop outside a delightfully skewed a view of the Gotham as on its upper ledge as purple dusk descends genteel Henry James brownstone just as Joe Chierchio, a romantic who grew up in over this city of dreams, in yet another dawn breaks over Washington Square Park, Brooklyn. atmospheric scene by Chierchio that the familiar arch rising toward the gilt-edged Fresh from a successful exhibition at The reminds you of Chet Baker’s cool jazz or clouds like the Arc d’ Triumph, transform- Gallery, in Sag Harbor, Chierchio again one of those great old movies like “Young ing familiar Greenwich Village into an imag- brings his unique style of nostalgic art noir Man With a Horn.” inary Paris. to the Gallery of Graphic Arts, Ltd., at Make no mistake about it: every picture But there’s a simultaneously grittier side 1601 York Avenue, from September 9 tells a story in the art of Joe Chierchio, and to Chierchio’s private world as well that through October 4. technique has a lot to do with it: that mel- comes across in “The Shape Up,” where a Like Edward Hopper’s famous painting low, grainy, well-worn quality that he gets longshoreman in a floppy cap, a lumpy over- of a nocturnal dinner, “Nighthawks,” with colored pencils touched up with water- coat thrown over his shoulders like a cape, Chierchio’s images have a way of lodging color could remind you of the rusty patina sits shivering on a chilly waterfront pier with themselves into your memory, where they on your old man’s work clothes hanging on a tugboat behind him at approximately the linger like the melodies of old jukebox a hook when you were a kid. The firm black same time as the milkman makes his deliv- tunes. Even more peculiarly, each new pic- outlines in his drawings could also remind ery. This guy clutches a rolled-up copy of ture appears to take on the aura of an you of old-fashioned comic book illustra- the Daily News like a club, and casts a wary, instant classic. Indeed, Chierchio is the visu- tion, albeit with more subtle shadows and shifty-eyed glance over his shoulder. Maybe al poet of “Deja vu all over again,” to bor- highlights enhancing the atmosphere, as he’s simply watching for the stevedore, hop- row Leo Durocher’s witty redundancy; the seen to particular advantage in “The Last ing to catch his eye and be hired for a day’s nostalgia factor is so strong in his work that Train,” which could recall that great last work; or maybe he owes money to the loan you could swear you’ve seen these scenes scene in a romantic movie where the girl sharks on the gangster-infested docks and is before––either in an old movie or a small who’s been having her doubts finally makes ready to make a run for it if he sees their out of the way museum somewhere in some up her mind and comes racing along the thugs approaching to work him over like alternate reality like the one that Chierchio platform as the guy hangs halfway out of the they did to Marlon Brando in “On the depicts. train, their hands reaching out to each other Waterfront.” Either way, it’s clear that, as my old man used to say, “life is no picnic on the docks.” The last time I spoke to Chierchio, when he called to fill me in on the dates of his exhi- bition, he was excited about a new piece he was working on. “I’m gonna call it ‘The Phone Call,’” he said. “It’s a guy stand- ing up at a pay phone, looking over his shoulder, watching a girl go And indeed it is another reality, one in just as the door is about to close, plumes of into a hotel. It’s down by the Brooklyn which the guys and dolls of film noir meet smoke flowing from chimneys in the back- Navy Yard, and you can see the Brooklyn Pulp Fiction and New York landmarks can ground and the bridge, that beautiful Bridge in the background. The guy has this be wheeled around and rearranged like stage Brooklyn Bridge that the artist knows so little satchel beside him. I don’t know sets to create locations that ultimately seem well, poised majestically against the deep whether they’re going to get together, or if realer than real for duplicating the vividness blue night sky. he’s on the lam, or what...” of dreams. In “Pershing Square,” for exam- Romance is everywhere in this city of Like I said, there’s a story behind every ple, Chierchio has restored the row of ele- dreams, where in another picture called picture. But it’s obviously as mysterious to vated shoeshine chairs outside Grand “Date Night,” a couple gets out of a Art the artist as to the viewer, because Joe Central Station. Deco-looking coupe of a cab on a street Chierchio’s pictures have a life of their own. After all, grown men don’t wear sneakers where a Horn & Hardart Automat is right in Chierchio’s virtual realm and most of next door to a glittering movie marquee ––Byron Coleman them wouldn’t dream of venturing out advertising “HUMPHREY BOGART in JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO 31 THE Robert Baribeau: BROOME STREET Recent Work GALLERY June 11 - July 18, 2008 Ground floor, 1,300 sq. ft. Exhibition space rental Allan Stone Gallery available 113 East 90th Street, NYC 10128 498 Broome Street, Tel. 212.987.4997 Fax. 212.987.1655 New York, NY 10013 www.allanstonegallery.com Tel: (212) 941-0130

Simple Pleasures A fine arts exhibit through June 15, 2008 Tania Espina • Gertrude Fleming • Robert L. Jones* Carolyn Kaplan • Yeemee Lee • Shirley Z. Piniat Theresa Rosano• Robert T. Schultheis • Robert N. Scott* • Chantal Soustra• Yukako Curators*

Broadway Mall Community Center Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

Biho Asai - Fudemai Calligraphy/Performance eight emerging artists July 15 - 26 Calligraphy Exhibition Michel Belknap Sarah Mahan July 22 - 26 Performance including Calligraphy Kevin Dwyer Deann J. Matheny Carla Lindsey Anna Myers 12pm - 5pm (last program starts 4pm) Philip Lique J.D. Richey Refreshment will be served Show dates: June 17-July 5, 2008 Reception and performance: Opening Reception: June 19, 5 to 8 p.m. Thurs. July 17, 6-8pm Japanese food will be served Caelum Gallery 508-526 West 26th St., Ste 315 New York, N.Y. 10001 212.924.4161 fax 212.924.4353 www.caelumgallery.com [email protected] Tues - Sat 11-6pm KENNETH DINKEL The New York Debut Broome Street Gallery 498 Broome st., NYC 212.226.6085 Presents Paintings BY Suejin Jo

Winner of the 2008 Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Solo Exhibition Award

June 10 -22, 2008 “Fireworks” 36" x 30" Opening July 1 - 31, 2008 reception Reception: Wednesday, July 9, 5:30 - 7:30 pm Thursday, The Berkeley Gallery June 12, 6-8PM 3 East 43rd St (Btwn. Madison and Fifth) Orbit, 2006, New York City 10017 oil dry pigment Mon - Fri, 9am - 7pm Sat, 9am - 3pm on canvas, 20 x 10 For information, contact Bob Keiber, 212-252-2065

C AN Salon 2008 A mixed media fine arts exhibit

CONTEMPORARY ART NETWORK Curated by Leila Elias and Berik Kulmamirov June 18 - July 6, 2008 Reception: Saturday, June 21, 2:30-5:30 Samir Anastasius • Hossain Azmeer • Meg Boe Birns GROW Joseph Boss • Udeaku Chikezie • Leila Elias Jutta Filippelli • Harriet G. Green • Archie Hamilton Mahmudul Hassan • Pud Houston • Aydar Khusainov Berik Kulmamirov • Madi Lanier • Lori Lata EXHIBIT Paul Margolis • Leanne Martinson • Margo Mead Olga Papkovitch • Shirley Z. Piniat • Emily Rich Nadia Rivest • Anne Rudder • Don Sichler Catherine Silver • Eva Sochorova CONNECT Meyer Tannenbaum • Yukako • Marlene Zimmerman Broadway Mall Community Center Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm 580 8th AVE NYC 10018 212 354 2999 CANNYC.COM [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

JUNE/JULY/AUGUST 2008 GALLERY&STUDIO Dorothy A. Culpepper Expression on the Edge

“Peacock,” acrylic on canvas, 36” x 48”

July 8 - August 2, 2008 Reception: Thursday, July 17, 6 - 8 pm

CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY 547 WEST 27TH STREET NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001 PH. 212.268.0088 FAX 212.274.1717 WWW.MONTSERRATGALLERY.COM