June/July/August 2009 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com Vol. 11 No. 5 New York GALLERY&STUDIO Oil on canvas, 77 15/16 x 58 1/16 in. (198 x 147.5 cm) Sara Hildén Foundation / Sara Hildén Art Oil on canvas, 77 15/16 x 58 1/16 in. (198 147.5 cm) Sara Hildén Foundation /

Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968 Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, Two Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992) / DACS, London York ARS, New The Estate of Francis Bacon / Finland © 2009 Tampere, Museum, MONSTER MASTER Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Ed McCormack, pg. 12 art of emotionalism

Climate & Environment International Show

October 12 to 31, 2009

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Joanna Banek • Linda Domanoski Barbara Frankiewicz • Carla Goldberg Stephanie Joyce • Basha Maryanska Uzia Ograbek • Agnieszka Opala Helena Szawlowska • Aga Szyfter Lubomir Tomaszewski • Barbara Walter Veryal Zimmerman

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GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009

G&S Highlights On the Cover: Seen as a sideshow to mainstream modern art for much of his career, in “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the painter of screaming popes emerges posthumously was a postmodern master. –Page 12

Stephen Cimini, pg. 7 Karin Perez, pg. 21

Dorothy A. Culpepper, pg. 4

Ebip Serafedino, pg. 23 Enrique Cubillas, pg. 22 Shizuko Kimura, pg. 17

The GALLERY&STUDIO advertising deadline for the September/October issue is MODERN HISTORICISM August 7 for color, Architectural Designs & Drawings August 1www0 for black/white. by Irina Shumitskaya and Anton Glikin

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2 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Russian Melodies Echo Through the Fiber Art of Ludmila Aristova hile many woman artists who began and fairy Was painters turned to textiles in the tales in a late 1960s and early ’70s, at the height of charm- the feminist era, and, once having dis- ing faux covered their rich coloristic and textural naive possibilities, made them their medium of figurative choice, the Russian-born artist Ludmila manner, Aristova came to fiber art from the opposite seemingly direction. informed In 1969, after completing her studies in equal at the Moscow Textile Institute, Aristova mea- began a career in fashion design, and by sure by 1981, her bio tells us, was well known for Russian “creating one-of-a-kind wearable pieces, icons, which were exhibited and sold at the Mos- the set cow Art Salons and to a group of private designs clients.” From examples one has seen in of Natalia reproduction, there can be no doubt that Gon- Aristova’s wearable pieces are works of art charova, in their own right –– particularly a fanciful and the garment called “Midnight Waltz,” with a colors long dark skirt that swirls sparkling visions of the of the night city around the wearer’s legs, Fauves; as though she were dancing along the to for- “Birth of Super Nova” Photo: D. James Dee skyline. mally so- passages of painting to her compositions Although Aristova continues to create phisticated Neo-Constructivist geometric wherever she deems them appropriate.) wearable art (“Midnight Waltz” won the compositions; to the more lyrical abstract Like her great Russian predecessor Was- 2008 Creme de la Creme award at the pieces and cityscapes she will be showing at sily Kandinsky, who also named some of International Quilt Festival, in Houston, Noho Gallery in Chelsea, 530 West 25th his compositions with musical terminology, Texas), she was introduced to art quilts Street, from July 28 to August 22. (Recep- Aristova makes visual analogies to color and during her first visit to the United States tion: Thursday, July 30, 5-8pm.) sound in a gemlike series of small pieces in in 1991, and they quickly became her new Among Aristova’s most dynamic recent perfectly square formats, entitled “Etudes.” passion. She found that the techniques of pieces is “Birth of Super Nova,” in which These are among her most lyrical works. piecing, appliqué, wafering, embroidery, she employs a rich variety of stitching tech- As with Paul Klee’s smaller works, their beading, and quilting that she had been niques and now unavailable Russian fabrics intimate scale serves to draw the viewer using in her garments for years were tailor to depict one of those stellar explosions, closer, to savor Aristova’s use of silken made (to succumb to a bad but irresistible occurring only once every fifty or so years, ribbons layered like contrapuntal rhythms, pun) for her new art form. And since she that can reportedly outshine an entire gal- strands of golden fiber that sing out as apparently began without a lot of the self- axy. In keeping with the chromatic intensity stridently as trumpet blasts, and areas of conscious preconceptions about stylistic of this magnificent cosmic phenomenon, stitching that meander like supple melo- consistency that can hobble those who’ve her colors are especially luminous here, dies, creating striking visual counterparts always considered themselves fine artists, with vibrant golden yellows, interwoven to musical composition. And in a slightly she was free to experiment with a variety of with an entire spectrum of secondary hues, larger piece called “Sounds of Music # 4,” themes and ideas simultaneously. radiating out from the jaggedly irregular brightly colored beads, set against equally Obviously, her new life in New York City explosive shape, set against a tactile field of brilliant ribbons, layered like tactile skeins provided her with one continuing sub- darker tones, that serves as the nucleus of of oil impasto, suggest bouncy notes in a ject after she settled here permanently, as the composition. rollicking jazz score. evidenced by “Landscape,” in which, now This piece is a splendid example of the Equally evocative are four companion liberated from function, urban structures seemingly contradictory yet occasionally pieces called “Seasons,” in which those four like those in “Midnight Waltz” (the Empire germane term “abstract realism,” since turning points of the year are interpreted State Building prominent among them) are it bears a striking resemblance to photo- with the singular lyricism that has garnered set against a pink and orange sky filled with graphic images one remembers having seen Ludmila Aristova numerous awards and puffy, rhythmic cloud formations, created over the years of actual supernovas. Yet it a place in several private and museum col- with a combination of quilting and delicate also functions superbly as a nonobjective lections, including those of the All-Russia hand-tinting. composition combining the gestural energy Museum of Decorative-Applied and Folk Also inspired by mythology, folklore, of Abstract Expressionism with a chromatic Arts, in Moscow, and the Museum of Arts her Russian heritage, and any number of complexity that, by virtue of the infinitely & Design in New York City. other things, Aristova obviously didn’t variegated subtleties which can only be In the present exhibition at Noho Gal- worry about contriving a “signature achieved with fiber, surpasses most Color lery in Chelsea, however, a venue that has style,” seemingly realizing early on that Field painting. (At the same time, being proven especially sympathetic to innovative her singular aesthetic sensibility, supported more interested in heightening the expres- fiber art, one gets to see a truly sumptuous by her exquisite technical ability, imposed sive qualities of each work, whatever it selection of her very best work. its own consistency. Thus she was able to takes, than adhering to notions of technical move freely from depictions of village life purism, Aristova is not adverse to adding –– Ed McCormack

June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 3 Dorothy A. Culpepper: Emotion in Motion

“ lassical” might the more familiar Cseem an odd one becomes with word to apply to Culpepper’s com- paintings such as those positions, the more of Dorothy A. Cul- one realizes that pepper, whose solo “Cocoon in Red” they are possessed of show is on view from June 30 to August 1, evident component in the paintings of an entirely different dynamic than that of at Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, Culpepper, who once said that she regards the older painter. For rather than swirl- 547 West 27th Street, where her work is paint as “an extension of my feelings or ing linearly across the canvas, her poured also featured in the venue’s year-round moods.” At times it has been more overt, forms appear to surge forth from within the salon exhibition. (Reception: Thursday, as in a series of deeply affecting works that composition, giving the sense of a gigantic July 2, 6-8pm.) she showed in 2004 in memory of her then gush, as in the aforementioned reference to After all, Culpepper is known for her recently deceased husband. But even when a volcano. energetic use of dripped and splashed pig- the emotion is less specifically expressed, it Indeed, molten lava is what immedi- ment to conjure up a sense immediacy in is always present in her paintings as a mo- ately comes to mind when one looks at a her abstract paintings that is anything but tivating force. It drives her compositions, painting such as “Purple Deep,” a hori- retrogressive. However, even in Culpep- often making them an emotional roller zontal composition dominated by massive per’s recent work –– which shows a height- coaster ride for the viewer as well. But it converging areas of purple and red shot ened sense of action and a bubbling energy is always an exhilarating ride, in which the through with smaller splashes of green and which now verges on the volcanic –– the passenger is a full participant, flowing along white that appear to be borne along by the term seems to apply. For in much the on the irrepressible tide of the Culpepper’s larger forms as though by an explosion. As same manner that a classical composer like feeling-driven compositional rhythms, rid- in many of Culpepper’s paintings, the paint Beethoven (to choose the most obviously ing their rhapsodic tide. seems to flow from several directions simul- histrionic example) channels strident sturm As is inevitable with any artist who pours taneously, as though perhaps the canvas has und drang into symphonic coherence, Cul- paint so freely, Culpepper is frequently been turned and reversed during the act of pepper invariably reins in potential chaos to compared to Jackson Pollock, and that painting to redirect its movement. achieve a sense of balance, proportion, and comparison is not an altogether faulty one This sense of ebb and flow, of stop and restrained emotion. –– at least in terms of the tremendous go, however it is achieved, can create a Make no mistake about it: emotion is an energy that both artists share. However, thrillingly vertiginous sensation in the 4 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 “Purple Deep” viewer, as if, like some of the forms, he or a painter’s palette, a sumptuous sundae of least none that this viewer can immediately she is actually being borne along by the optically delicious form and color. discern) which makes the meaning of the molten flow of the pigment. Here, as in Equally evocative in its own manner title explicit. Yet the entire composition falling in love, losing one’s bearings can be is “Moonlight Down,” another totally shimmers with variegated forms and hues great fun! abstract composition filled with atmo- that nonetheless suggest something myste- Can one refer to a painting that virtu- spheric allusions to natural phenomena rious and numinous, beyond the everyday ally bowls one over visually “amiable and that have been transformed by the artist’s manifestations of this earthly plane. Here, engaging?” Well, there’s no other way to vision. The composition consists of three Culpepper appears to apprehend the spirit describe another new work that Culpep- bold areas of color: yellow, green, and blue of an otherworldly phenomena, purely per calls “H2O Falls.” Color for one thing in descending order. Yet as much as one through her spontaneous handling of form is particularly clear and strong in this very resists reading abstract paintings as if they and of color that seems to surge of its own vertical composition, consisting of vibrant were a Rorschach test, something about accord –– as indeed it must when she pours blue and verdant green hues cascading the way the green bleeds up into the yellow one color into another and moves the can- down into an equally brilliant area of red in sinuous streaks suggests tree limbs lit vas to encourage its flow or manipulates the at the bottom of the picture space. The by moonlight and the splotches of white paint in some other way to make the colors title, of course, suggests another way of glimmering in the lush hush of blue below intermingle, creating a kind of marbleized saying “waterfall,” but the image is by no suggests stars reflected in a nocturnal river, effect, suggesting a metamorphosis as sin- means literal. For while Culpepper once making this ostensibly nonobjective com- gularly mystical as the creation of a peacock stated that her paintings are “portraits of a position as atmospheric as one of Casper feather. landscape that is within, a visual monument David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes. Indeed, while the scale of her work and in space and time,” the glistening blue At the same time, however, such interpre- her spontaneous process is akin to that of forms seen here drip down more in the tations are bound to be subjective on the the Abstract Expressionists, the synthesis manner of syrupy blobs than actual H20, part of the individual viewer, and while between the natural inspiration and the and the river of thick, red pigment run- some of Culpepper’s titles may prompt fan- mystical realization that Culpepper brings ning in rivulets below imitates no known tasy to some degree by leading the imagi- about in her paintings also harks back to river nor anything else known in nature. nation in a certain direction, her paintings the even earlier innovators of the Stieglitz To put it simply, what makes this painting inevitably retain their abstract autonomy. and Arensberg circles, who, while well so immediately winning is that it suggests In the lyrically titled “Angel Wings,” for aware of formalist developments in Paris, some fanciful amalgam of a waterfall and example, there is no specific referent (at created a more homespun brand of Ameri- June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 5 can modernism deeply rooted in subjective experience. Certainly she has taken the spirit shared by artists such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe further in her own singular meld- ing of Abstract Expressionist and Color Field aesthetics. Yet she is clearly their spiritual heir in her extension of a visionary tradition that dates back even further to the great American visionary Albert Pinkham Ryder. This kinship seems especially evident in a painting such as “Growing Pains # 2,” where again the composition is deceptively simple, consisting primarily of an area of red above an area of green. Both are laid down in a maze-like welter of swirling strokes, inflected with bits of yellow and overlaid with a network of white splashes. The composition is so vigorously accom- plished and gesturally intricate as to compel one’s attention and admiration purely as a calligraphic abstract construct. Yet here again, as the title suggests, there is a natural foundation to the work that this viewer interprets as a statement about the interac- tion of sunlight and foliage as it relates to organic growth. Yet, in a more personal context, this composition simultaneously suggests to me that, here, nature is also being used as a metaphor for painting itself and particularly to the painful ongoing struggle that one must undergo to con- tinue growing as an artist. For the paintings of Dorothy A. Cul- pepper appear as deeply laden with multiple meanings as they are densely layered with pigment. Granted, some meanings are less decipherable than others, such as those which one has no doubt must lurk beneath the surface of a work like “Asteroid Fear.” Not that one need know exactly what inspired this work, mind you, which might take more plumbing of the artist’s psyche than seems necessary. (Didn’t de Kooning, when the the former Beatle Paul McCart- ney visited his studio and asked what the subject of a particular painting was, answer, “Gee, I don’t know ... it kind of looks like a sofa, doesn’t it?”) Suffice it to say, “As- teroid Fear,” with its storming effusions of blue and red strokes intersected by anxious splashes of brilliant yellow, is one hell of an exciting composition. On the other hand, another major composition called “Cocoon in Red” seems to yield its secrets more willingly, with its golden red central shape glowing ethere- ally amid roughly circular green forms on a yellow ground enlivened by bright splashes of purple. For while this painting supplies the viewer with no more specific visual information than the previous canvas, in it Dorothy A. Culpepper creates a vision of nascent beauty whose promise is realized in its own creation. –– Sanford L. Frank “H20 Falls” 6 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Stephen Cimini Fans the Flame of Ambitious Abstract Painting “ ne thing that has hardly ever been While Cimini’s Onoticed about all the feats of the drawing skills evoke far-out, beginning with the Futurists, and Diebenkorn, who especially with Duchamp, and with Dada vacillated between and going on,” Clement Greenberg de- the figure and ab- clared in a Seminar in 1962 at Bennington straction for a good College, “is that far-out art could never do part of his career, anything with color.” the impact of his Granted, the greatest critical curmud- color is akin to that geon of modern times, was given to of Hans Hofmann’s sweeping generalizations, and his use of lush, geometric- the term “far-out” now seems somewhat based canvases (as comically dated, like an old fogy reacting opposed to his against the confounding antics of “beat- more linear gestural niks.” However, Greenberg’s assertion excursions). Yet, is still basically sound in relation to art in contrast to which traffics not in the eternal verities Hofmann’s thick that make for great painting, but in drama impastos and and novelty –– as does much of the art strident colors attracting an inordinate amount of media Cimini’s surfaces attention today. show a restrained For this reason among others, it is not painterliness, woven only refreshing but heartening to encoun- of smooth, sumptu- ter a painter like Stephen Cimini, a recipi- ous strokes, and his ent of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner coloristic relation- Foundation whose exhibition is on view at ships are consider- “Royal Flush” Noho Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from ably more complex nent, as well as the sublime variations on July 28 through August 22. (Reception and subtle in a manner to Walter Darby a similar palette, albeit with a small central Thursday, July 30, 5 to 8 PM.) Bannard, an influential but unheralded rectangle serving as the piece de resistance For as the much earlier and, for my precursor of Color Field, Minimalism, of the picture in “Beauty of Balance.” money, much greater critic, John Ruskin, and Post Painterly Abstraction especially As Fairfield Porter (who was one of the once said, “If he can colour, he is a active in the 1960s. best critics because, as a painter himself, painter, though he can do nothing else; if Indeed, Cimini adds marble dust and he viewed art from the inside out) once he cannot colour, he is no painter, though wax medium to his oil paints to give his put it in a more general context, it is clear he may do everything else.” And Cimini colors a soft, almost smoky multilayered in Cimini’s work that “the greatest pos- is not only an outstanding colorist but translucency that is quite unique in con- sible attention has been paid to something able to do “everything else” as well, if we temporary art. One might be tempted to whose importance to the artist is a mea- take that phrase to encompass drawing, compare it to a similar smokiness in the sure of its reality to him.” composition, and all the other elements surfaces of Rothko, but the “tempera- This sense of the actual reality of the of what the aforementioned Greenberg ment” of Cimini’s color is so much less painting itself superseding subject mat- referred to as “high pictorial art.” somber, as seen in a canvas such as “Red ter (which seems to have occurred quite From century to century, these basic River,” with its emblematic composition literally as his city-inspired compositions attributes do not change as much as some of bold, bright, rectangular and semi- “mutated” more abstractly) is enhanced might think, even as fashions in art change triangular areas of blue, red, and yellow so by the perfectly square formats Cimini drastically. Given that Cimini is an abstract subtly modulated as to elude the classifi- favors (often 20 x 20 inches for his smaller painter, draftsmanship, for example, may cation of “primaries.” And even in those canvases and 40 x 40 inches for his larger not be the most immediately obvious of his paintings which are built on more ones). A no-no, according to traditional aspect of his paintings. Yet, much in the muted combinations, such as the brown, art teachers who warn students against manner of Richard Diebenkorn’s abstrac- purple, violet and orange color areas in the “monotony” of symmetrical supports, tions, strong drawing skills provide the “Royal Flush,” Cimini creates a subtle, these square formats (along with stretcher formal armature on which Cimini’s com- simmering chromatic frisson all his own. bars three inches deep) add to the sense of positions rest. Whether or not he actually Color, above all, is invariably an event the painting as an object, rather than an draws on the canvas before he begins to in Cimini’s paintings, an occasion for illusionistic construct. paint is hardly the issue; what is relevant is sheer delectation. For the combinations in This is a radical approach in an era that, while his canvases ostensibly consist which he juxtaposes color makes it “do” when so much so-called “far-out” art has mainly of geometric color areas, drawing, things, and makes one understand by the ultimately proven surprisingly reaction- as it relates to precise spatial delineation, positive example of its active presence ary. Stephen Cimini’s integrity lies in his is a powerful phantom presence in his exactly what Clement Greenberg was refusal to abandon the adventurous spirit compositions. Or, as Cimini himself puts complaining about in relation to those of aesthetic discovery on which the best it in a recent artist statement: “I have been painters for whom color is merely a pas- abstract painting was founded and on developing a vocabulary for my current sive element. Witness, for one example, which it continues to thrive. work since 1996, which originates from the interaction between the overlapping the linear landscape of New York City. It rectangles of greens and blues of vari- has since mutated to geometric spaces and ous shades and hues in Cimini’s “China –– Ed McCormack their relationships to each other while still Green,” where the allusions to urban adhering to its architectural origins.” architecture appear particularly promi-

June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 7 The Paintings of Martina O’Brien Reconfigure the Irish Landscape from Scratch e often tend to stereotype the culture of cally accurate and evocative. Yet running Wa country when a particular field of emi- alongside their representational qualities are nence happens to upstage all others. Ireland abstract attributes that bring her paintings is a prime example: While Irish art is hardly as alive in coloristic and tactile terms belonging well known as Irish literature –– and par- to the art of painting alone. ticularly Irish poetry –– that verdant land has Her colors, for example, are not taken produced its own fair share of distinguished directly from nature in any slavishly imitative modern painters, including George Barret, manner. It is highly doubtful that the streaks Francis Danby, Frederick William Burton of purple-violet and the strident aquamarine and Jack Yeats, the younger brother of the blue hues between the brown mounds of great poet William Butler Yeats. And among moist earth in O’Brien’s oil on canvas “Divid- the contemporary Irish artists encountered ed Seascape Sandymount” would have been “Divided Seascape Sandymount” recently, one of the most impressive, as well present in the actual scene from which the as one of the most quintessentially Irish in artist worked. However, what they do seem paintings, and here too, there is an intrigu- her subject matter, is Martina O’Brien, whose to depict accurately is O’Brien’s emotional ing interaction between the materiality of the work can be seen at Agora Gallery, 530 West response to this particular shoreline close pigment and the ethereal nature of what it 25th Street, from June 2 through 23. (Recep- to Dublin’s coast. And therein lies its true depicts, particularly in her handling of vapor- tion: Thursday, June 4, from 6 to 8 PM.) verisimilitude; for like all artists who make a ous cloud masses. In this regard, she seems to O’Brien, who studied at The National Col- subject wholly their own, O’Brien puts the share a certain kinship with John Schueler, an lege of Art and Design, in Dublin, invariably singular stamp of her style upon the place, American Abstract Expressionist who discov- starts with a very specific landscape, which transforming it in purely painterly terms. ered his true artistic vocation in “skyscapes” she sketches in charcoal and colored pencils Some of the tactile qualities in her paint- painted off the Coast of Scotland. before moving on to her main medium of oil ings are created by adding substances such as Yet Martina O’Brien is finally a unique paints. Working with brush and palette knife, bee’s wax, sand, acrylic and hemp to her oil talent, generally taking four to six weeks on she begins with the actual lay of the land, but pigments, into which she also scores ridges each painting, building its surface with oil and eventually develops the composition along with her palette knife, creating painted ter- mixed media until it is not so much a repre- abstract lines, even while remaining faithful rains as rich and substantial as those in the sentation of the Irish landscape as a similarly to its essentials. Her compositions are lyrical compositions on a material presence that can encrusted surrogate for its earthy firmament, expressions of the particular qualities of light make one think of furrowed fields. magnificently recreated in her own inimitable in the locations that she chooses, atmospheri- Skies are another major feature of O’Brien’s manner. – – Wilson Wong Aesthetic Archaeology: Preserving Aspects of “Lost New York” or some of us the past will always be in the poor but also under the gun, as its amuse- Yankee slugger taking a swing, while the Fblack and white, like stills from an old ment rides dwindle and urban planners plot, catcher and ump lean forward expectantly... movie. Which made it seem a brilliant stroke is also fondly preserved in Jennifer Holst’s an instant classic, especially now. And that the that there were no color prints in “Lost New evocative close-ups of funny cartoon figures, figures are too tiny to be identified makes it York,” a recent exhibition by the West Side crude signs advertising fried shrimp, Italian even more symbolic. Arts Coalition, at Broadway Mall Commu- Sausages, and the annual Mermaid Parade, Surely Jane Hoffer’s picture of a tall stack nity Center, on the center island at Broadway on the roof of a boardwalk junk food joint. old fashioned cardboard take-out cups lean- and 96th Street. And Cal Eagle, who actually works in Coney ing like a slinky toy (or maybe “The Tower Curated by Jean Prytyskacz, one of the Island as a social worker, gives us yet another of Pizza,” if one may be forgiven a terrible participating artists, the show was a true angle on that fabled place, with his striking pun!) is another kind of classic, but her most nostalgia trip for those of us who have spent candid portrait of a young Hispanic mother affecting picture is “Factory, Queens” –– an most of our lives in the city. No one who with a Botticelli ringlet dangling in her face, exterior view so bleak and grim that one has remembers the Lower East Side before it oblivious to her immortal beauty as she grips to wonder: is the barbed wire on top of the was gentrified could resist Brunie Feliciano’s her little girl’s hand, steeling herself to de- fence to keep intruders out or the workers in? “Orchard Street” series: Coats hanging scend the steep boardwalk stairs and join the Washington Heights, home of a vibrant from tenement fire-escapes for display by the madding crowds milling on the midway. Hispanic population, was recently celebrated discount clothing stores with the ragged, A bird’s eye view of Harlem, New York’s in the hit play “In the Heights.” But it is droopy awnings down below, next door to bustling center of Black culture, is captured the vertiginous topography of this highest the yawning yaps of darkened hallways. by Rudy Collins in a great image called point of upper Manhattan that Carolyn Reus Deena Weintraub also gave us compelling “Apollo, 1964,” showing a long white celebrates in her dynamic print of joined images of the same neighborhood, evoking Cadillac limo parked outside that legendary apartment buildings soaring skyward like twin its history as a home to immigrants of many theater, its marquee announcing the great ridges. lands and a melting pot, with pictures of the soul singer JACKIE WILSON –– whose fine Richard Zapata also finds reminders of peeling paint and crumbling brick facades of ride one likes to imagine that must be, idling the natural world in an urban setting in his an old synagogue and a Puerto Rican com- at the curb! atmospheric night views of an unpopulated munity center. Both artists preserve some- Some say that the old Yankee stadium, Central Park, transformed into a winter thing essential about a vital area where such built in 1923, was washed up by the ’70s. Yet wonderland, with snow drifts piled high and sights are now being replaced by high-end it will be a long time before the shiny new tree-limbs encased in ice that glitters like bars, boutiques, and art galleries, as LES (as stadium that replaced it this year, nearby in crystal in the glow of the lamplight. it’s now abbreviated) turns into a theme park the Bronx, has as much history. Bob Merritt Then there is Ellen Zaroff, who discovers a for tourists and slumming rich kids. immortalizes the original nostalgically in his kind of readymade surrealism in the way Funky Coney Island, still a playground for miniature yet monumental print of some Continued on pg. 24

8 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Inimitably, Sheila Finnigan Transmogrifies the Middle Ages he Chicago artist Sheila Finnigan earlier painting by Finnigan, based Tis a pretty blonde woman with a on Michelangelo’s “Creation.” Only Mona Lisa Smile. Or maybe it’s more in Finnigan’s version, the two figures like a Cheshire Cat smile. Anyway, touching forefingers are female and it’s a wry smile that seems to harbor superimposed over a long narrative a sly secret. And her installations, poem by the artist called “dripping which combine elements of painting jewels.” and conceptualism in a quite peculiar In short, punchy, lowercase lines manner, are like that, too: witty and of free verse, the poem, to which appealingly charming on the surface the artist’s recently deceased sister but filled with hidden compartments, contributed material, is about a Nazi dark chambers, and the echo of rue- woman at the close of World War II, ful laughter. drawing an apt parallel between the In a 2004 solo show called “One atrocities of that era and the origins Stop POP,” Finnigan cast Andy of the Crusades in the Middle Ages. Warhol as a kind of ringmaster of an And while Finnigan’s syncopated installation that uncannily captured syntax may be more reminiscent of the real-life role he played as a Sven- Edgar Allen Poe, the work overall, gali-like manipulator of many who with its synthesis of soaring nude came under his sway. In subsequent figures and printed text, suggests a exhibitions she channeled other dynamic postmodern permutation of icons and martyrs such as Jackie O William Blake’s illuminated poems. and Marilyn Monroe, and skewered Also included were a smaller, George W. Bush for –– well, where more lighthearted marriage of image does one begin? –– and heckled Pope and text that takes the form of a Benedict XVI for abolishing Limbo. fable about a unicorn and a flower; In the latter case, it was not get- a whimsical drawing of chain mail ting rid of a sort of Port Authority hanging on a clothesline; three juicy Bus Terminal between Heaven and gestural paintings of hearts titled for Hell, where the souls of unbaptized a phrase from Chaucer, “Amor Vincit children supposedly languish for Omnia” (love conquers all) that also eternity, to which Finnigan objected, “The Rebellion of the Unicorn” seem to reference similar works by but the unmitigated gall of any mortal two mural-scale mixed media paintings Jim Dine; and a group of Neo-Dada man thinking he could “by a simple decree, of unicorns on unstretched canvas: “The found object sculptures, with titles such move Heaven and Earth.” Language of the Unicorn” and “The Re- as “Hand of Armor” and “Medieval Time Finnigan, you see, has a problem with bellion of the Unicorn.” According to the Machine,” that suggested archeologi- Power, which she also expressed with artist, the former addresses “the bullying of cal finds turned up in a dream. Like her characteristic wit in a new sculpture consist- religious believers to convert those of other previous exhibitions, this most recent show ing of an old wheelbarrow combined with faiths to theirs, or else,” while the latter, demonstrated Sheila Finnigan’s ability to huge, rusty gears and other funky found in which the mythical beast appears to be unite and breathe new life into diverse con- objects, called “Medieval Weapon of Mass lashing out with its hooves at a kneeling temporary art forms, even while advanc- Destruction.” The imposing, comically knight, imagines “the unicorn rebelling ing her singular world view and aesthetic clunky piece was featured in Finnigan’s against the powers that be as well as the sensibility. sixth New York solo show “Illusionistix,” interpretation given to the unicorn itself.” –– Ed McCormack seen recently at Pleiades Gallery, 530 West Both compositions are executed with 25th Street, in Chelsea. compelling contem- Western Connecticut State University Master of Fine Arts in Painting & Illustration However, the inspiration for and center- porary immediacy in piece of the exhibition was “The Knight in Finnigan’s insouci- Shining Armor,” an actual suit of armor. ant style, with bold Gallery show to highlight The artist borrowed it from her sister, Car- charcoal lines defining olyne Keitel Bernstein, who passed away the main forms, globs nine emerging artists shortly before the show was to open, and of white paint stuck Jessica Bartlet Jan Nichols fitted it with an electronically beating heart. to the raw cotton Karen Bartone Perry Obee Amplified, as in an echo chamber, within duck like spitballs, and Carmen Canal Tracy Powers MF the hollow steel suit, its constant mortal expressive stitching James Gabianelli Jennifer Wheeler A toll haunted the installation. Thus tinged and loosely dangling Bryn Gillette by a sense of elegy, Finnigan’s satire seemed threads added to the all the more mordant this time around. mix to remind us that Show dates: June 16–July 4 Her sister’s now audio-equipped knight the medieval master- Opening Reception: Thursday, June 18, 5–8 p.m. set the tone for the other medieval imagery pieces upon which they Blue Mountain Gallery in the installation as well. Yet, as always, are based were woven 530 W. 25th St., 4th floor Finnigan’s imagination ranges freely rather than sewn. New York City between many centuries, from antiquity to Another large wall in Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11 a.m.–6 p.m. the present, making numerous art his- the gallery is covered www.bluemountaingallery.org torical stops along the way. The Unicorn by a huge Glicee print (646) 486-4730 Tapestries, which she finally got to see in a entitled “Goddess and visit to the Cloisters last Summer, inspired Eve,”adopted from an 181 White Street, Danbury, Connecticut www.wcsu.edu/graduate June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 9 Delicious Sin: Confectionery Art by Peter Anton and Gina Minichino at Allan Stone Gallery n an earlier location in the 1960s, Allan with palpable sensuality but also with an “French IStone Gallery, now at 113 East 90th emotional resonance that reminds us what Fries,” Street, simultaneously launched the career we mean when we call certain special treats another of Wayne Thiebaud and the contempo- “comfort food.” oil on rary genre of sensual food art. It stands to Peter Anton’s mixed media wall sculpture panel by reason, then, that the gallery is presenting “Boxed Doughnuts” is a case in point. Two Minichino Gina Minichino through June 19, simultaneous first solo are already missing from the dozen, a grease is just as exhibitions by the sculptor Peter Anton and stain marking the spot where one was, a dramatic the painter Gina Minichino in a delectable semicircular smear of chocolate for the other in its own double bill. –– as though whoever picked them up from way, its Some people call junk foods “empty the bakery could not delay the solace such styrofoam calories,” but both of these artists seem to goodies bring. Here, as “Special Assort- tub of see them as sustenance for the soul. ment” and other candy sampler pieces, the fleshy “I have an innate reverence for the things austere modernist grid is subjected to an krinkle- we eat,” says Anton, who fashions his antic revamping with gaudy confectionary kuts oversize sculptures of doughnuts, ice cream colors and sugary psychedelic swirls: Agnes drenched Peter Anton sundaes from wirecloth, wood, plaster, Martin with the munchies! in viscerally resin, and acrylic. “The sensual nature of But Peter Anton’s largest and most spec- glistening ketchup and nailed to the picture- the works stimulates basic human needs and tacular piece was “Spilled Sundae,” a lovely plane like a crucifixion. desires that generate cravings and passion. mess on a big white pedestal, complete with Perhaps the most affecting painting of “My food paintings are connected to puddled chocolate syrup, melting mound of all, however, is “Twinkies,” in which the my childhood and growing up,” says Gina ice cream, and an askew maraschino cherry. two ladyfinger-shaped yellow cakes, nestled Minichino, whose intimate oils of cheese None of Gina Minichino’s food paintings cozily in the familiar transparent cellophane balls and packaged cupcakes descend from are more than a few inches in dimension; wrapper, take on the gravity of a secret vice the 17th Dutch still life tradition. “I found yet all have enormous presence by virtue of by virtue of how Gina Minichino veils the a lot of comfort in those packaged ready-to- their portrait-like intensity and strange sug- left side of the composition in shadow. eat foods.” gestiveness. Indeed, her show also includes By comparison “Multi-Grain O’s,” Like their great predecessor Thiebaud, five superb miniature portraits, but none up- although just as beautifully painted, seems a both Anton and Minichino differ in their stages “Peanut Butter and Jelly,” a peculiarly sober capitulation to dutiful adulthood! lack of irony from those Pop artists who delightful picture in which a hand holds the parodied consumer products. Instead, they sandwich up to the viewer like a seductive –– Ed McCormack invest their greasy, gooey edibles not only sock-puppet. Gerard Stricher’s Striking Abstract Synthesis n the mid twentieth century, French family “where art was all over the place” possibly a process Ipainting and American painting seemed as important factors in his work. And both of wiping some of to represent opposite aesthetic poles. Smart- can be readily discerned in the lyricism and the pigment away ing from European dominance of art for art historical sophistication of his paintings. with rags soaked in many centuries, the Abstract Expressionists Perhaps his greatest asset as a painter, turpentine. Not that sought to steamroll French finesse with however, is his skill and sensitivity as a one would assume to their brash new style. In the postmodern colorist, even when working with a single guess how Stricher precincts of the present century, however, it color as he does in two sumptuous oils on actually achieves is now possible for an artist to enjoy the best canvas, titled respectively “Blue Day” and his subtle coloristic “Recreation” of two worlds, as the French artist Gerard “Flying to the Sea.” Both compositions alchemy, which can Stricher apparently has in his paintings on are literally saturated in brilliant blue hues remind one at times of the great British view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, that light appears to glow through. Like all landscape master J.M.W. Turner’s “tinted from from June 27 through July 17. (Re- of Stricher’s paintings they are altogether steam,” as his admiring fellow artist John ception: Thursday, July 2, from 6 to 8 PM.) abstract, yet permeated by a strong natural Constable once referred to it. For Stricher’s large oils on canvas appear allusiveness, as though the shadowy shapes All one can say is that Stricher imbues to combine Abstract Expressionist energy lurking pregnantly just below the surface of his canvases with a sense of atmospheric with School of Paris refinement in a manner his semi-translucent oil washes are on the light that is quite rare in contemporary that sets his work somewhat apart from both verge of morphing into recognizable land- abstraction, particularly in paintings such as schools and lends it a distinct character of scape or marine subjects. However, Stricher “Hiding in the Purple Forest,” and “The its own. invariably pulls back from direct representa- Golden Hair,” where rhythmic effusions of Perhaps that Stricher, who painted as a tion, perhaps in order to retain the sense of green, yellow, and purple hues fairly illumi- young man, took up his brushes again after mystery and abstract autonomy that makes nate the compositions. having had a long and successful career in his paintings so fresh and compelling. Indeed, Gerard Stricher’s chromatic lu- business, had something to do with how his In other paintings, as well, where he minosity, combined with a sense of sponta- style has evolved. Starting over as a mature explores a more varied palette of reds, neity that results in an exhilarating gestural artist, he seemed to know exactly how to greens, yellows, and other hues along with vivacity, imparts to his paintings a singular begin. the ceruleans and ultramarines that seem aesthetic resonance, uniting in a striking In a recent artist’s statement, Stricher, to dominate many of his compositions, synthesis aspects of abstract painting that who lives and works in Paris, cited the Stricher creates a shimmering chromatic were once thought to be irreconcilable. influence of nature and growing up in a effect, both with vigorous strokes, and –– Peter Wiley 10 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Kerrie Warren Charts a New Frontier for Abstract Expressionism he phrase “Physician heal thyself” energy of life,” Warren states; all of which pear to swarm within the composition like Tseems to apply auspiciously to the may account in part for the meditative dancing atoms. Australian artist Kerrie Warren, whose feeling of peaceful calm that her work pro- The vital new scientific field of quan- paintings are on view at Agora Gallery, 530 motes in the viewer. But in purely painterly tum physics provides Warren with some West 25th Street, from June 2 through 23. terms, her technique also has a great deal of her inspiration. In an artist’s statement (Reception: Thursday to do with it. issued by the gallery in connection with June 4, from 6 to Unlike many Australian her exhibition, she speaks of “the tracking 8PM.) artists who look closer to and marking of energy,” as well as “finding For after attaining home for artistic models, patterns within chaos.” Indeed, it is the a diploma in Trans- attempting to emulate well patterns that she finds within the chaos that personal Art Therapy, known Australian modern enables the viewer, with the slightest per- with the idea that it painters such as Sidney No- ceptual shift of vision, to arrest the move- would provide her lan or Brett Whitlely, Warren ment that she generates with her vigorous with a means of sup- was drawn to Abstract swirling strokes and discover the serene port while following Expressionism. Of the artists stillness at the heart of her compositions. her true path as a “Patterns in Chaos” in that American movement, And this duality of effect, manifesting painter, Warren eventually discovered that she is closest in both spirit and technique in the constant perceptual shifts that occur she had been drawn to painting primarily to those who work in an “overall” mode as one contemplates her paintings for pro- “for my own healing and evolvement as a of composition such as Milton Resnick, longed periods of time, is what distinguish- person, as an artist.” and, especially, Richard Pousette-Dart, who es Warren’s work significantly from that Thus she now paints full-time in her once stated, “I am an artist of the con- of Abstract Expressionist predecessors like rural studio in Crossover, Victoria, ap- cealed power of the spirit, not of the brute Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. proximately an hour from the capital city of physical form.” For Kerrie Warren appears to have Melbourne. Yet, ironically, it would appear The same might be said of Warren, evolved the capacity, through the layer- that the curative aspect of her work may whose thickly encrusted surfaces seem to ing of intricate tiny strokes of mainly pure still be more contagiously extensive than undergo a magical metamorphosis from primary hues that ultimately seem to meld she thinks, given the serenity that radiates the material to the ethereal and emit actual into a single energy field, to simultaneously out from her paintings when one encoun- light. A strong sense of movement also animate and stabilize all activity on the pic- ters them in a gallery context. comes into play in her large acrylics on ture plane, and finally apprehend the calm “My reference points are internal, my canvas such as “Patterns in Chaos,” “Com- stillness at the center of the painterly storm. influences are environmental and I feel posing Chaos,” and “Organised Chaos,” –– Maureen Flynn a deep connection with nature and the where myriad minute particulate forms ap- Nuria Rabanillo Paints “Everyperson” in the Abstract ot too long ago figurative and with fragmented figurative daily business in a Nabstract art were at opposite ends elements, specifically heads, global context which of the aesthetic spectrum. The dawning set against geometric areas has already surpassed of the postmodern era, however, created of hard-eged color. the wildest imagin- a détente between contending tenden- These heads are sur- ings of science fiction cies and opened up a whole new range of rounded by thick white writers. visual possibilities for artists who wished to lines that could either Indeed, Rabanillo’s express facets of our increasingly complex suggest spiritual auras or faces seem to stand and fragmented reality while creating work the blank areas for cutting for the existential that was also innovative. around paper dolls. (Such plight of “Everyper- One artist who has evolved a synthesis ambiguousness is one son,” lending a hint that succeeds splendidly in both regards is of the things that makes of irony to a title such the Spanish painter Nuria Rabanillo, whose Rabanillo’s paintings so in- as “Silencios,” for a solo show was seen recently at Montserrat triguingly enigmatic.) But large painting of over- Contemporary Art, 547 West 27th Street, however the individual lapping faces floating in Chelsea, and whose work is included in viewer cares to interpret “Silencios” unmoored against a the gallery’s year-round salon exhibition. them, one thing is inescapable: they seem color field divided into black and brown The first thing that struck one upon to speak volumes about the sense of isola- rectangles. And in an even larger canvas entering the gallery during Rabanillo’s tion, disconnection, and alienation that called “Serenidad,” a long row of faces, exhibition was the sheer abstract impact of many people feel in the modern world. enlivened like a color chart by a spectrum her mostly large acrylic paintings on canvas Thus, like the depersonalized figures of vibrant hues, suggest targets in a shoot- and smaller works in the same medium on of the American sculptor Ernest Trova or ing gallery. linen or paper. the emaciated subjects of the Swiss sculp- Also including smaller works (ominously Overall, the colors in Rabanillo’s com- tor and painter Alberto Giacometti, they reminiscent of 9/11 from a New Yorker’s positions are relatively subdued, often with have a universal resonance that is made point of view) in which tall buildings awash large areas of black and/or brown defining all the more dramatic by the emblematic in acidic hues loom against skies where the dominant forms; yet they are high- abstract forms in Rabanillo’s paintings. And airplanes and helicopters swarm like tiny lighted here and there with piquant bursts of for all their cookie-cutter sameness, their insects, this exhibition revealed Nuria brighter red, orange, green, violet, or blue features are subtly expressive, perhaps a bit Rabanillo to be an artist who combines hues –– usually contained within specific melancholy, as if to suggest the repressed formidable formal statements with a sin- areas. However, it is the stark tonal contrasts emotions beneath the impassive masks that gularly fascinating, if slightly eerie, slant on that lends her work its formidable presence, most of us must wear as we go about our modern life. –– Maurice Taplinger

June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 11 Monster Master: Francis Bacon at the Met by Ed McCormack Andy Warhol once invited my wife Jeannie everyone at a posh London party by single- which originated at Tate Britain last fall and and me to an intimate dinner in the dining voicedly booing a slightly tipsy Princess continues through August 16 at The Metro- room of the Algonquin Hotel. It was hosted Margaret off the bandstand when she got up politan Museum of Art. by Jerome Hill, an elderly heir to the North- to sing Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.” The drawing is also reproduced, along with ern Pacific Railroad fortune who bankrolled “Someone had to stop her,” he said after- three spare, diagrammatic compositional the magazine then called Andy Warhol’s ward, as though he had performed a merciful doodles, one on the final page of a book Interview, for which I wrote regularly. public service. “If you’re going to do some- about Rembrandt, in “Francis Bacon Incu- The other guests were Jane Forth and thing, you shouldn’t do it as badly as that.” nabula,” a copiously illustrated coffee table Donna Jordan, two wicked young vamps But try as I might, I couldn’t find the volume of Bacon’s studio detritus published who were the stars of Andy’s new film skylight incident anywhere in the book upon by Thames & Hudson to coincide with the “Women in Revolt”; the film’s director Paul which the film was based, nor in any other exhibition. However, in both the book and Morrissey; Glenn O’Brien, then the editor Bacon bio I flipped through (in fact, there’s the exhibition commemorating the 100th of Interview, and his wife, an aspiring actress evidence to suggest that it might have been anniversary of the artist’s birth, the bulk of who called herself Jude Jade; the blonde a self-mythologizing fabrication on the part the archival materials consist of printed, paint- transvestite actor Candy Darling; and Jerome of the artist himself ). Most likely, Bacon met smeared, often torn, wrinkled, or otherwise Hill’s nephew, the socialite and African wild- Dyer in one of the after-hours dives in Lon- distressed source materials salvaged from that life photographer Peter Beard. don’s East End that he frequented to drink, overgrown garbage garden of a studio. It was a bit like the Mad Hatter’s Dinner gamble, and pick up “rough trade.” There are postcards and tear-sheets of Party in “Alice in Wonderland,” as Jane and Still, Peter Beard, described in Farson’s paintings by Velazquez, Ingres, Raphael, Donna made a great show of making out book as “Bacon’s best friend in New York,” Soutine, and other artists Bacon admired; with each other, Andy took Polaroids to egg says of the artist, “Like Andy Warhol, I never livid medical illustrations of diseased mouths them on, and the waiters fawned over Candy, saw him flinch.” and feet; tintypes of seances and vaporous who resembled Kim Novak, rushing to light And that’s truth enough for me. “spirit materializations”; newspaper and his cigarettes and refill his champagne glass * * * magazine photos of battered boxers recoil- because they thought he was a real girl. Draftsmanship has always been especially ing from a blow or sprawled on the canvas; Meanwhile, I kept glancing across the prized in British art, a tradition dating back corpses in morgues or at crime scenes; a table and wondering when Peter Beard, a to Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination. double-page spread from a French maga- handsome, clean-cut fellow with impeccable Drawing is stressed rigorously at The Slade zine juxtaposing a grisly photograph of a table manners, was going to morph into a School and other English institutions of art pile of severed limbs and a George Grosz distorted monster. But I don’t think it was instruction and practiced skillfully by con- ink drawing of a sex murderer dissecting a because of the copious intake of cannabis temporaries of Bacon such as Lucian Freud, nude female body with a meat clever; news that, in those days, always kept me on the David Hockney, and Ron Kitaj. Bacon, photos of bullfights, riots, pitched street brink of hallucination anyway. however, was self-taught, and while there’s battles, Nazi rallies, and massacres; pictures After all, Peter had had his portrait painted ample evidence of superb natural draftsmanly of sides of beef and chickens hanging from by Francis Bacon. ability in his canvases, he claimed hardly meat hooks; museum postcards of Greek * * * ever to draw, (except in paint). His claim statues; Muybridge motion photos of naked In “Love is the Devil,” a film based on is backed by the fact that only a few rough wrestlers (to be transformed into lovers); Daniel Farson’s biography “The Gilded sketches survive, tossed off on pages torn out images of muscle boys posing on the cover Gutter Life of Francis Bacon,” the first scene of art books or scrawled over photo repro- of a publication called “Physique Pictorial”; finds the artist, played by Derek Jacobi, loll- ductions salvaged from the floor of the no- snapshots of George Dyer in his underwear; ing in bed in his studio. Suddenly a bum- toriously cluttered London studio where he photo-booth strips of the artist posing in all bling burglar, played by Daniel Craig, comes worked knee-deep in rubble –– and where, of his Dorian Gray glory, possibly taken as crashing through the skylight. Bacon pulls come to think of it, there would hardly have references for his sequential self portraits, and aside the covers and invites him into bed. been room for a cot, much less a bed! a close-up film still of the screaming nurse Craig, looking shabbier than he later Perhaps out of self-consciousness about his from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” would as James Bond, is portraying George lack of formal training, he had always been which became the model for the gaping Dyer, a hapless Cockney petty criminal who secretive about his artistic process. Only after mouths in many of Bacon’s paintings. became Bacon’s lover, model, and Muse –– his death in 1992, when the entire contents In the absence of the extensive trove of until the painter tired of him after a few years of his studio were moved to the Hugh Lane drawings that most painters of his stature and he killed himself with sleeping pills on Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, in Dublin, leave behind, these diverse studio sweepings the eve of a big Bacon retrospective at The did Bacon’s so-called “working documents” offer an invaluable paper trail to Bacon’s Grand Palais, in Paris. come to light. One of his few actual draw- inspirations. Other items of a more obscure As a reckless young practitioner of the ings, an image of a lumpish figure on a sofa, nature provide a source for personal specula- so-called New Journalism, my motto used sketched in diluted black pigment on the tion: Did the presence amid the rubble of a to be “never let facts stand in the way of colophon of Eadweard Muybridge’s “The paint-splashed copy of “The Artist’s World,” truth.” But having grown more scrupulous Human Figure in Motion,” is included, Fred W. McDarrah’s 1961 photographic –– one might even say more timid –– over along with sixty-four major oils, as well as record of mostly abstract American paint- the years, I wanted in the worst way for that an eclectic selection of archival materials ers at work and at play, present a taunting scene to be factual as well as true. It was not (displayed in a room papered with a photo- reminder to Bacon that, as long as “The only journalistically irresistible but went so graphic mural evoking the claustrophobic New York School” still held sway, he would well with the debauched legend of the artist chaos of the artist’s studio), in the exhibition remain something of an unfashionable out- who, according to Farson, once mortified “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” sider on this side of the Atlantic? And did the 12 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Triptych—In Memory of George Dyer, 1971 Oil on canvas 77 15/16 x 58 1/16 in. (198 x 147.5 cm) each Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel © 2009 The Estate of Francis Bacon /ARS, New York / DACS, London even more incongruous-seeming amateur the Met, gained the twenty-four year old art- that he can beat the abstract lads at their own drawing manuals by the popular illustrator ist instant attention when it was reproduced game. One such work is “Blood on Pave- Andrew Loomis and others suggest that, in in Herbert Reade’s influential bookArt Now ment” (1988), a spare geometric composition the privacy of his studio, one of the twentieth and sold to a prominent collector, it is clearly divided into three Rothko-esque horizontal century’s great self-taught innovators was derivative of the bone-like figures from Pi- bands, the grayish center one bearing a vague secretly taking lessons in figure drawing from casso’s surrealist period that Bacon had seen red smear. (Having once happened upon the his artistic inferiors? in Paris just a few years earlier. However, his queasy aftermath of a fatal collision between a * * * first and most important mentor, after he bus and a bike rider, the cyclist’s baseball cap “Seeing a painting by Francis Bacon returned to London and set up a studio, was still sitting in a puddle of blood in the gutter, hurts,” Ernst van Alphen, a professor of the older English painter Graham Suther- I don’t think it’s possible for art to outdo real Comparative Literature at the University of land, traces of whose dry spiky style are life at this sort of thing –– especially while try- Leiden, The Netherlands, once wrote. “It still evident in “Painting,” (1946), Bacon’s ing to prove something.) causes pain. The first time I saw a painting by picture of the sinister, mortician-like figure The other figureless canvas, from the same Bacon I was left speechless...” standing under the black umbrella in front year, is “Jet of Water,” in which a spermy In his private life, if not in his art, Bacon of a crucified side of beef in the collection of white splash of “action painting” gushes seemed to prefer receiving pain to inflicting The Museum of Modern Art. from a sort of spout-like shape with one of it. Born in Dublin to an English steel heiress Sutherland, a devout Catholic, was inspired those incongruously diagrammatic little red and horse trainer, his lifelong masochism to paint crucifixions by Gruenwald; Bacon, arrows, (adopted from a golfing instruction may have been spurred when his father an atheist, was moved by Hitler’s atrocities manuel) that Bacon inserted into a few of his ordered his grooms and stable boys to to treat a related theme more horrifically in paintings pointing to it. Such “distancing” horsewhip him, after he was discovered in “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a devices ill suit a painter of Bacon’s visceral early adolescence posing before a full-length Crucifixion,” (1944),” in which grotesque gifts. If the point was to create an “almost mirror in his mother’s underwear. While they limbless monsters, set against a strident abstract” composition and yet retain the were at it, according to the artist, the stable orange ground, bare not the expected fangs drama of a suggestive allusiveness, the picture hands also “broke me in sexually.” but more eerily bizarre rows of perfectly even fails miserably on both counts, neither im- Fleeing the puritanical confines of Ireland human teeth. pressing the viewer with its formal attributes to settle in London at the age of 16, Bacon * * * nor evoking anything in particular. worked sporadically as an interior decora- By the 1950s Bacon was exhibiting regu- But these two paintings and “Triptych” tor and furniture designer, even getting one larly, but he still lacked technical finesse, and (1991) –– a watered down work in which he of his room designs photographed for The as several paintings from that period reveal, included surprisingly banal cameo portraits Studio, a prestigious British magazine of fine too often his themes came off gratuitously of himself and a recent lover–– are literally and applied art. But he eventually found it grotesque. Still, while anatomy is fudged and the only duds in an exhibition that makes a easier to take a classified ad in The Times, colors are muddy, he turned crudeness to his convincing claim for Bacon, not only as an offering his services as a “gentleman’s advantage in stark canvases such as “Study important postwar painter, but also a bold companion.” One such gentleman, a former for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin” pioneer of gay-themed art at a time when military officer with a reputation as a ladies’ (1957) and “Paralytic Child Walking on homosexual acts were still criminally punish- man, whom his father asked to “take the boy All Fours (from Muybridge)” (1961). But able offenses in Great Britain. Indeed, as in hand,” took him to Berlin, where they in “Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI” with its major exhibitions of William Blake, shared a hotel bed and partook together of (1957), sloppy Expressionist brushstrokes Lucian Freud, and J.M.W. Turner in recent the city’s decadent late-Weimar nightlife. and colors that make nature as garish as years –– as well as the more modest show of Bacon would later admit that he seemed to neon are vulgarly melodramatic, like Kirk exquisite little mystical landscapes by Samuel be “drifting” until 1927, when he went to Paris Douglas’s screen impersonation of Vincent Palmer that the museum mounted not and saw a Picasso exhibition at Galerie Paul in “Lust for Life.” Intended as a tribute, the long ago –– this Bacon retrospective goes a Rosenberg. After visiting the show several times, picture becomes an inept parody. long way toward correcting the American he made up his mind to become a painter. Perhaps the weakest paintings at The Met, misapprehension of England as an essentially * * * however, are an odd couple of canvases, sans literary country that has produced many Although “Crucifixion, 1933,” the first figures, in which Bacon appears to be attempt- important writers but few major painters. For painting one encounters in the exhibition at ing to demonstrate, without much conviction, a good part of his career Bacon, particularly, June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 13 seemed to be regarded here as irrelevantly Bacon’s popes would have to be considered his subjects inside out, revealing their raw outside the mainstream of modern art his masterpieces. human vulnerability, making Rawsthorne, a –– perhaps a quirky painterly peer of “The He followed the popes with his “Men in woman known for her elegant beauty, look Angry Young Men,” British counterparts Blue” series, depicting burly figures in suits as though life had happened to her like a of the Beat Generation writers and poets. and ties (attire that was an erotic turn-on disfiguring accident; subjecting the digni- In fact, Bacon’s existential stance was closer for Bacon, according to his biographers) fied middle-aged Leiris to a Jekyll and Hyde to that of the American Beat writer William suggesting businessmen, politicians, or other transformation that makes him resemble a Burroughs, an acquaintance to whom he symbols of masculine authority, in dim offic- cyclops. Nor did Bacon spare his own mortal once complained, not without some justifica- es or hotel rooms with the draperies drawn, flesh in “Self Portrait” (1973), in which he is tion, that art critics didn’t know “fuck all” as though for nefarious assignations. In one seen contorted in a chair, his legs entwined about painting. such painting, “Study for a Portrait” (1953) like vines, clutching his head as he leans into I once saw a photograph of Bacon and Bur- the vertical “shutters” merge with the a lavatory sink as if to regurgitate. It’s a mon- roughs in the late 1970s, reeling tipsily along horizontal lines of the closed venetian blinds umental image of isolation and existential a London street together in double-breasted behind the figure in a manner much like the despair. Painted two years after the suicide of suits like a pair of dapper vampires on the abstract stripe paintings of Sean Scully. his lover and favorite model, George Dyer. prowl, and they certainly looked like kindred Bacon’s early experience in interior decora- Dyer was a sharp dresser who in some spirits. The main artistic difference between tion and furniture design may have inspired his photographs resembles a cruder, more hawk- them, though, is that while Burroughs was use of rooms and their furnishings as settings nosed Cary Grant, and by all accounts sounds an avowed avant gardist, more likely to be and props for seamy human dramas. Cer- like a character out of one of Guy Ritchie’s influenced by sci-fi and popular culture than tainly no other painter has made chrome rails, farcical Cockney gangster movies. Farson the great literature of the past, once over porcelain bathroom fixtures, striped mattress remembers him as a likable loser who coyly his early infatuation with Picasso, Bacon ticking, circular throw rugs in pukish greens fobbed off Bacon’s distorted paintings of him modeled his work , in however a mutated a with textures like astroturf, among other tacky as ““ orrible,” yet was clearly pleased by the manner, on that of the Old Masters. Not that accoutrements of modern living, so integral status he gained in the bohemian demimonde his approach was in any way academic; quite to his compositions. Witness the curvaceous of London by posing for “Portrait of George the contrary, being an autodidact he impro- toilet bowl that the beefy male nude appears to Dyer Riding a Bicycle” (1966), “Study for vised on the canvas as spontaneously as any be riding like a motorbike across the scatologi- a Head of George Dyer (1967),” “Study Abstract Expressionist, often flinging paint cal brown floor in the first panel of the 1964 of George Dyer in a Mirror,” (1968) and and exploiting accidents, even if the forms at triptych “Three Figures in a Room,” or the numerous other canvases in which he appears which he finally arrived (apparently through a gaping dresser draw spewing its contents in the clothed or in various stages of undress. process of subconscious association not unlike room behind the bed on which the painter has But by far the most powerful and poignant a Rorschach test), were figurative rather than piled two boneless-looking naked women like images that Bacon painted of him are the abstract. And like Warhol, whose “Marilyns” a mass of writhing protoplasm in the first panel posthumous ones, particularly, “Triptych –– In he called “rubbish” but whose “car crashes” of “Triptych – Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem Memory of George Dyer,” (1971). In the first he could appreciate, Bacon scoffed at the ‘Sweeney Agonistes’.” panel, wearing black trunks and boxing shoes, cult of the original, preferring to work from It seems no wonder that Bacon admired Dyer is seen as one of those fallen pugilists in postcards for his “Study After Velazquez’s and identified with Eliot’s poetry, which, the grainy news photos salvaged from the Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1953), and like his own paintings, addresses the spiritual artist’s studio floor. In the second panel, he not even bothering to see the actual painting squalor of modern times, and that he chose becomes a spectral figure in a dark suit, standing when he visited Rome. that poem in particular with its lines, “Birth, in a rundown hallway, holding a key in a door In Bacon’s version, the gape-mouthed and copulation/And death/That’s all the and turning to gaze down a dark stairwell, an pope, seen through the vertical streaks that facts/When you come down to brass tacks.” image Bacon based on the lines from Eliot’s the painter called “shutters,” which he Bacon insisted that all of his paintings be “The Waste Land” that go, “I have heard the sometime used to meld the figure to the framed under glass (an unusual presentation key / Turn in the door once and once only / picture plane, suggests an angry zoo ape for works in oil, especially on so large a scale) We think of the key, each in his own prison / shrieking behind the bars of its cage –– not so that the viewer would be forced to see Thinking of the key, each confirms his prison.” unlike the actual chimpanzees and baboons his or her own reflection in the glass. Going And in the third panel, Dyer is seen in hawkish that he painted around the same time. Over from gallery to gallery at the Met, one sees profile, decked out in a white shirt, tie, and the next decade he created several varia- oneself mirrored in Bacon’s bleak existential jacket, as in one of those idealized likenesses that tions on the theme, some showing the pope milieu of shabby bed-sits and bathrooms they lean against the casket-lid in funeral parlors. enclosed by rectangular lines that would where bodies take on the grisly aspect of hu- Yet, typically of Bacon, the panel also contains later seem prophetic of the bulletproof glass man meat on laboratory counters or morgue a more grotesque, blob-like image of Dyer’s booth in which Adolf Eichmann stood trial slabs. One confronts mortality face to face head melting down onto what looks like a one- for his Nazi war crimes. They were some of and is made to feel complicit in the often re- legged table in an East End fish ’n’ chips joint. his most powerful paintings, and if he was pugnant moral miasma that the artist evokes. According to Vanity Fair art critic John later known to dismiss them on occasion As we walked through a room filled with Richardson, who was close to Bacon, Dyer in conversation, it was probably out of the the intimate, unsparing paintings of his first attempted suicide at the Algonquin Ho- same weariness with which a popular musical friends that became a constant of Bacon’s tel, where this story began. It was in 1968, performer might resent requests for an old mature oeuvre, stopping first in front of during the two men’s first visit to New York. hit song. Those nightmarish –– some might “Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne,” (1966), Dyer went back to the hotel and took sleep- think demonic –– visions of a transfigured then “Portrait of Michael Leiris” (1976), ing pills after Bacon publicly humiliated him religious leader possess an iconic grandeur Jeannie, who has always likened these works in a bar. Richardson recalls that when Dyer that any painter, once having accomplished to the portraits of Giacometti, observed, finally succeeded in killing himself in Paris them, would be at pains to top. For if a “They’re powerful presences, more like por- four years later, Bacon remarked, “Death can work’s ability to imprint itself indelibly on traits of souls, with all the suffering on the be life enhancing,” and began his series of the mass consciousness is any measure of its surface, than superficial likenesses. When you memorial portraits. importance in an age that thrives on con- look beyond the mere monstrousness, they In grief, as in life and love, Francis Bacon troversy, like de Kooning’s “Women,” with seem to encompass both life and death.” was unflinching. which they are roughly contemporaneous, And, indeed, Bacon did seem to turn * * *

14 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 A New “Picture Generation” Emerges at Blue Mountain Gallery ssuming such shows can be harbin- Hopper in her oil on panel of a small- Obee’s oil “Stu- Agers of coming trends, perhaps a town street where areas of sunlight dio Interior #2.” more painterly update of “The Pictures and shadow grace a shop facade with But here, too, Generation––1974-1984,” presently at a narrow alley running alongside it. content is crucial, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is in the Although no people are visible, the title in terms of how offing, judging from the 2009 MFA Thesis “White Trash” may denote a certain Perry insinuates a Exhibition of Western Con- class of resident. self-portrait into necticut State University, at But the real deal is a the composi- Blue Mountain Gallery, 530 smooth synthesis of tion, making one West 25th Street, from June atmosphere and un- wonder if the 16 through July 4. (Opening derlying abstraction Perry Obee figure at the easel reception: June 18, 5 to 8 PM.) suggesting that Bar- is reflected in a For if the Met’s show gives tone could be a latter-day mirror propped up on another easel –– or is more than equal time to peer of Fairfield Porter. an image in a painting within the painting. photography the emerging Jessica Bartlet also Either way, it’s a brilliantly realized comment artists in WCSU’s exhibition combines descriptive and on the inseparableness of art and life, and are all about painterly pictorial- formal elements, albeit the sense of ambiguity makes it all the more ism with a strong emphasis on in a more gestural style, effective. narrative. Jennifer Wheeler, for Jennifer Wheeler in her oil on panel “Icy One example, shows “Wonderland,” a large oil Rock.” Working in a mostly monochromatic can only on panel that initially captures one’s atten- palette, touched by assume that tion with its hot pink, baby blue, and bright hints of pale blue pictorial- Carmen Canal orange hues. But the intricate ostensibly and purple, Bartlet ism comes naturally to the three illustration abstract composition gradually yields its makes thick white majors included in the exhibition. Still, it’s a teeming figurative content: a hobby horse, impasto a palpable hopeful sign for the future of their increas- a clown doll, and various toy figurines that surrogate for snow ingly endangered profession that all eschew turns less benign, as one notices that Godz- and captures an Photoshop and work with actual artist’s illa appears to be menacing that nice bunny exact sense of materials: Carmen Canal employs watercolor rabbit and reflections on ice with a light, lyrical touch to conjure up Barbie with thin gray oil “Sleeping Beauty-Autumn,” in which the is lying washes laid down fairytale character, her raven hair and long there with in swift strokes. dress blowing in the breeze, is surrounded her pretty Sliding deliciously Jessica Bartlet by gracefully floating autumn leaves. Canal’s dress between landscape and Abstract Expression- fine line and translucent washes of pale pink, pulled ism on the slippery viscosity of her medium, blue, and golden yellow aquarelle lend her up over Bartlet’s composi- illustration a poetic her face. tion is appealingly delicacy. Tracy Powers Suddenly muscular. By contrast, Jan “Won- “Denun- Nichols employs casein derland” begins to look like an almost scary ciation,” an oil with egg yolk on ma- place, as though Wheeler has pulled back the by Bryn Gillette sonite in a meticulously curtain and shown us the sinister underbelly depicts a young detailed Magic Realist of the playroom, where the toys run amok father seated in technique reminiscent and violate each other when nobody is look- an easy chair in a of Robert Vickrey in ing. small, cluttered Jan Nichols “She Cast a Color- A sense of giddy vertiginousness comes den or livingroom ful Shadow,” where a across in “Flight,” another large work in oil with an infant in his little girl passing a brick wall appears to be and gold leaf on canvas by Tracy Powers, lap. Their posture followed by a shadow of glowing lace –– a which locates the viewer in midair with the could suggest that benign ghost with a little bun in its hair just children on an amusement park ride, swing- they are watching like her own. Skillfully, Nichols’ picture sug- ing high above the tiny pedestrians below. Bryn Gillette television, but they gests the irrefutable “reality” of an imaginary Powers includes a great deal of detail, such as are actually watching what appears to be a friend in the private realm of childhood. the dense surrounding foliage, shadows on demonstration involving a rifle by Then there is James the pavement, and so on, yet skirts fussiness a life-size, robotic-looking figure Gabianelli, whose acrylic on by virtue of in full combat gear, standing on panel “Ariel 2009” makes her vivacious an exercise mat with barbells a contemporary icon of a brushwork scattered about its feet. That this sleek, streamlined motor- and strong figure, which has an artificial arm cycle, suspended emblem- sense of and a miniature heliopter flying atically against a luminous form. past its knee, is most likely a fig- golden background like a Karen ment of the father’s imagination James Gabianelli symbol of all adolescent Bartone, or memory does not make the aspiration. Gleaming with on the painting any less powerful or disturbing. chrome, this elegant dream machine appears other hand, A harmonic balancing of creamy colors to take flight of its own accord, as though it projects a and the skillful organization of a complex could bestow upon its owner the ultimate mood akin scene into a pleasing formal entity is what freedom of outlaw power. to Edward Karen Bartone strikes one most immediately about Perry –– Byron Coleman June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 15 Architecture as Arcadian Dream: The Watercolors of Irina Shumitskaya and Anton Glikin “ rchitecture is the art which so disposes architecture in the background of land- the lush-leaved branches and the equally Aand adorns the edifices raised by man, scape painters such as Claude and Poussin, sensual roundness of the rolling cloud for- for whatever uses, that the sight of them and similarly scattered across a landscape. mations in “A House in Trees,” where the may contribute to his mental health, power, Such a patron would also commission forms are defined by clear areas of light and and pleasure,” wrote John Ruskin, the watercolours of his house so that the whole shadow rendered with Magic Realist clarity. great 19th century British art critic who process becomes one in which painting and What unites them, however, is that both gave us the Last Word on the subject in architecture become interchangeable.” imbue architectural subjects with atmo- “Stones of Venice” and other architec- spheric qualities by virtue of their tural essays. shared ability to evoke what John Sadly, such exalted notions could Ruskin (now speaking of painting hardly be applied to the glass and steel rather than architecture) referred to boxes which have, in our own century, as “colour-light,” in regard to that replaced most of what might have chromatic alchemy by which, in inspired such eloquence on Ruskin’s transparent watercolor particularly, part. And since precious few shows the earthly substance of pigment can seen in contemporary art galleries give become a conduit of the ethereal. even the slightest inkling of what has Indeed, it is the talent of both artists been lost, one could only be grate- for accomplishing this feat that makes ful for “Architectural Watercolor: them painters, above and beyond Reviving a forgotten tradition,” an their recognized ability to render exhibition of works by Irina Shumits- architectural detail accurately. kaya and Anton Glikin,” seen recently Irina Shumitskaya demonstrates her at Gelabert Studios Gallery, 255 West skill in this regard especially well in 86th Street. Anton Glikin, “A Greek Revival House” “A Town House.” This is a plainer For here at last in the work of two picture than most of her others, since living artists was visual evidence of none of the seductive elements of those restorative powers of which nature are anywhere present. All that Ruskin spoke: proof positive of the one sees are the flat facades of three beneficial effects that the perfect syn- buildings on a city block, the elegant thesis of form, function, and the sub- town house of the title sandwiched lime can have upon the human soul. tightly between a tall prewar apart- As David Watkin, a professor at ment building and a slightly less Cambridge University and noted ornate house of practically the same researcher in classical architecture, height, with a bit of blue sky and some points out in the exhibition catalog, wisps of smoky cloud visible above the the 18th century tradition of archi- smaller two. Yet Shumitskaya brings tectural representation in watercolor, the composition alive, imbuing it which flourished most notably in with an almost Hopper-esque sense of Ruskin’s own England, was by and drama, primarily by the play of subtly large a lost art before being revived diffused sunlight and shadow over all by Shumitskaya and Glikin, a married Irina Shumitskaya “A House in Trees” three of their stony faces. couple from Russia, both practicing ar- Similarly, in “A Greek Revival chitects with numerous prestigious awards While connoisseurs of architecture House,” Anton Glikin invests the hand- to their credit, who studied together at St. would surely find much else to admire in some white mansion with the anthropo- Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. such an exhibition, the present writer, who morphic presence of a portrait by virtue of Armed with Masters Degrees in both Ar- professes no special knowledge in that field, how pregnantly it looms against a spacious, chitecture and Fine Arts, Shumitskaya and was especially impressed by the painterly as- purple-inflected gray sky, bordered on both Glikin not only celebrate classical design in pect of this synthesis. For both Shumitskaya sides by the merged masses of shadowy their watercolors but create unique works and Glikin possess an austere technical fi- trees. Conjured in aqueous dark washes, of art which, in the context of a time when nesse in watercolor that harks back to mas- these tree-masses take on a somewhat most architectural rendering is squeaked ters of the medium such as Gainsborough spectral quality, making the stately dwelling out with felt-tipped pens, seem every bit as Turner, and Cotman. Yet their twenty-first beam all the more brightly. eccentrically evocative in their own manner century artistic sensibilities shine through Both artists also work well in grisaille: as the scientific illustrator and outsider art- the patina of the past, conjoining nostalgia Glikin’s “A Mosque at Sunrise,” composed ist Renaldo Kuhler’s visionary paintings of and immediacy in peculiarly vital ways. And in mostly blue hues, turns the exotic East- an imaginary town called Rocaterrania. for all the similarity of their subject matter, ern structure into an emblematic abstrac- For while the houses that Shumitskaya each possesses a distinctive style. tion; Shumitskaya studies of garden scenes and Glikin depict belong to actual architec- Glikin, for example, employs an almost in sepia suggest a serene Arcadian dream. tural periods and styles, they transport the Impressionistic technique in the discrete Indeed, the entire exhibition, auspiciously viewer atmospherically to a time when, as brushstrokes of the overcast sky and rusty presented in one of the Upper West Side’s Watkin puts it, “architecture was designed autumnal foliage in “A House near River,” more elegant art venues, projected a pleas- as an incident in a landscape to which it was while the white mansion set back on the antly reposeful mood that made Ruskin’s ultimately subordinate. Patrons commis- lawn is rendered more precisely. By con- point about the healing properties of archi- sioned houses for themselves in the form of trast, Shumitskaya sets up a formal dialogue tecture seem a palpable reality. asymmetrical compositions like the fictive between the breeze-blown contours of –– Ed McCormack 16 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Shizuko Kimura at Noho Gallery: Beyond Mere Magic rtists do the impossible every day. So if the Museum of Arts & Design’s far-reaching with unflattering light and ungainly poses to Ait were merely a matter of technique, and much publicized survey of contem- avoid emphasizing the natural attractiveness Shizuko Kimura would be just another ma- porary fiber art from some 17 countries, of the human body, presenting it like meat gician. Granted, it takes an unprecedented “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery,” that she on a butcher’s cutting board. degree of manual dexterity to draw directly got her first major exposure in New York. Stitched in black or colored threads, on loose weave cotton muslin with a needle On the face of it, Kimura was hardly the or different combinations thereof, often and thread without making preliminary most radical artist in a show rife with sexual clustered or overlapping, as on a sketchbook sketches. And, admittedly, it’s even more politics and references to everything from page, sometimes interwoven with floral amazing that Kimura does so from the the trivialization of the genuine aesthetic val- forms, Kimura’s figures are real women, live model, often in neither glorified nor situations where the demeaned. Rather poses change quickly, than for some general- capturing nuances of ized notion of “ideal gesture not only swiftly, form,” they are beau- but with remarkable tiful for their mortal anatomical accuracy. particularity and the In fact, Kimura’s grace with which the drawing ability would artist delineates their be impressive in any various body types; for medium, particularly their quirky individu- for her detailed delinea- ality, rather than for tion of the physical the impossibly “per- characteristics and fect” proportions that facial expressions of were once enforced each individual model, with girdles and are while retaining a linear now maintained with fluidity that never flirts starvation diets. with the fussy. But Indeed, wielding here again, one would her needle like the have to regard Shizuko finest sable brush, Kimura as simply a Kimura comes across neat, technically daz- as the ultimate anti- zling novelty act, if not classicist for her refusal it for the even more impressively evocative ue of traditional women’s handicrafts to the to impose a template of formal presupposi- qualities that distinguish her first New York tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist sweatshop tions on her nude female figures (or, for that exhibition, “Sketch in Stitch,” on view at fire. Nor was she the most Pop-oriented art- matter, on the rare male nude who may turn Noho Gallery in Chelsea, 530 West 25th ist in an exhibition where novel needlepoint up occasionally among them), depicting Street, from June 9 through 27. (Reception: and embroidered portraits of personalities each for its unique attributes. At the same Saturday, June 13, from 4 to 7 PM.) like Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, George Bush, time, all are ennobled poetically by virtue “Working under strict time pressure in and Saddam Hussein also abounded. of her medium’s innate beauty, particularly this way produces a dynamic tension that Yet what could be more fraught with po- in the seven long, narrow, pieces suspended arises from the need to work at speed with litical significance or more of the moment from the ceiling like stately banners in her needle and thread in response to the model’s than a brand new approach to the classically present exhibition at Noho Gallery. pose,” Kimura has said of her process. “And posed and “objectified” female nude, a For in all of these pieces the light coming it is essential to capture the ‘Ki,’ or essence theme overwhelmingly interpreted through through the muslin, which is semitranspar- of the subject.” the distorting lens of what progressive art ent, like the most gossamer grade of rice Born in Japan, Kimura lived for over historians refer to as The Male Gaze for so paper, creates an ethereal effect, almost as two decades in London, where she gradu- many centuries? And what could be more though the figures are drawn on thin air. ated with masters degrees in textile art and innovative than for a female artist to treat And the fine stitched lines, like graceful philosophy from the Royal College of Art. this subject austerely with needle and thread, strokes of ink, combined with the vertical Earlier, she says, she studied calligraphy in primarily in line, foregoing for the most part format of the compositions and the spare Japan, but not Asian painting. all the rich colorations and seductive textures dispersal of the figures, with ample areas “All my training was in Western art, but normally associated with fiber art? of empty space between them, also calls to I think there is still something very Oriental David McFadden, the Museum of Arts & mind traditional Asian landscape scrolls like about my work,” she acknowledged in our Design’s Chief Curator, made a salient point the ones that Gary Snyder celebrates in his brief conversation with me; and in a written when he stated that Shizuko Kimura’s work epic poem “Mountains and Rivers Without artist’s statement, she elaborated as follows: “exposes physical and emotional states that End.” “My work fuses Oriental concepts of art and can challenge prevailing notions of beauty Thus, in a sense, Shizuko Kimura trans- aesthetics with Western concepts of figura- and the body.” For the female figures that forms these human models, sketched in tive sketch and abstraction.” she draws with thread are never either ideal- the workaday environment of an art studio Since 1997, Kimura has exhibited ized or sexualized in the manner extolled in with needle and thread, into rarefied beings, extensively, through the United Kingdom, Kenneth Clark’s study “The Nude” –– that simultaneously suggesting angelic messen- Australia, Japan and the U.S., and her pieces veritable manual of the Male Gaze! Nor gers on a cosmic plane and mythical Earth are in numerous international collections, are they deliberately uglified in the manner Mothers inhabiting a sensual linear terrain. including that of the Museum of Arts & of those male artists like Philip Pearlstein –– Ed McCormack Design, in New York City. In fact, it was in who, conversely, take self-conscious pains

June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 17 Danish Painter Per Hillo Delineates Our Interconnectedness ew contemporary paintings evoke the in his paintings, intuitive choices that he apparently Funderlying energies of all things as wherein the bound- makes in the act of painting, rather dynamically as those of Per Hillo, an artist aries between the var- than any contrived intellectual for- from Denmark, on view at Agora Gallery, ious elements mulation, plan, or forethought, that 530 West 25th Street, from June 2 to 23, become nearly indis- imbues his compositions with such 2009. (Reception Thursday, June 4, 6 to 8 tinguishable, merging irresistible energy and contagious pm.) in the graceful per- verve. For although his paintings contain imag- mutations of his Titles such as ”Life and es, the overriding element in Hillo’s com- flowing lines and the Opportunity,” “Flowers of Love,” positions is energy itself, expressed linearly forms that they delin- and “We Are Growing Together” in a manner different from yet akin in its eate. Indeed, the line seem to express the visual metaphors own way to how van Gogh’s jotted strokes between abstraction that Hillo generates through his energized his canvases, making poplar trees and representation is mergers of plant forms and the dance like flames and flowers appear to wig- all but erased by the human figure, conveying a sense of “Life and Opportunity” gle on their stems. free flowing move- the interconnectedness of all things In Hillo’s case, everything in his paintings ments of Hillo’s brush, which also makes a in nature, not only through line, but also is submerged in an organic environment mockery of what we normally think of as through the often close-valued colors which wherein plant forms, groups of human fig- the comparative scale of individual things. knit his compositions together both formal- ures and other elements merge within the Sensual plant forms, for example, often ly and chromatically. confines of his restless, constantly probing loom much larger than the human figure, In terms of composition, Hillo can only line and subtle color harmonies. which may be enmeshed between their be termed a “Maximalist” for his habit of fill- The artist––whose imagery has been seen leaves, along with faces and abstract forms ing almost the entire picture space with a everywhere, from mural scale decorations that defy specific description. The thrust of lively array of shapes that appear to swarm for a luxury hotel in Dubai to giant paint- Hillo’s pictures is invariably Expressionist in before the eyes, forming as they flow con- ings for corporate offices to the CD cover the same undogmatic manner as the school tours both recognizable and abstract. All, of the recently deceased jazz musician Niels of mostly Scandinavian artists known as the however, are animated by the selfsame ener- Henning Ørsted Pedersen to more than Cobra group. gies that converge with seeming effortless- twenty huge works for a chain of banks in Like his fellow Danish painter Asger ness from the artist’s brush, lush and sump- Copenhagen––states simply, “My art is Jorn, the most well known member of that tuous. about communication and about the way movement, Hillo is a marvelously fluent Per Hillo appears to be one of those we interact.” painter for whom every painting is obvious- natural born painters who spring up fully Visually, Hillo expresses this idea by virtue ly driven by emotion and an unerring formed, acutely attuned to their own inner of the interconnectedness of all the images instinct for form and color. Indeed, it is the music. ––Maurice Taplinger

G&S NYC GUIDE opportunities MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist portofolios for its new WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, slides, photos and brief geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, NYC 10001 Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, ARTIST’S EXHIBITION SPACE TO SHARE Elegantly appointed gallery in exclusive uptown PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & location welcomes inquiries from artists and curators. For information: (212) 753-0884 Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. Cell (917) 544-6846 [email protected]

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18 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Thierry Michelet Charts the Mortal Face and Body s a youth of eighteen, the French modulated with subtle gray tonalities. actual physiological amputation. Indeed, Apainter Thierry Michelet fell under Although the gaunt male face in one pic- in each of his portraits Michelet conveys the spell of Rimbaud, Artaud and Bataille ture resembles Marcel Duchamp, finding something of how life has its way with us all, and published a collection of poems. But individual likenesses in these works hardly carving experience into our faces. Like the he eventually enrolled in the Ecole des seems necessary; for they have a universal eroded portraits of Leonard Baskin, all of Beaux-Arts of Bordeaux, where Christian resonance. One is a woman with a rather Michelet’s subjects have a half-ruined quality Boltanski and Annette Messager were artists broad visage and an expression that makes that imparts to them with a Job-like hero- in residence, and found his true vocation as her mouth suggest a barely healed wound, ism, bespeaking the need to triumph over a visual artist. as her everyday suffering in order to achieve one’s Yet an element of the poetic is still evident dark eyes full humanity. in Michelet’s paintings, on view at Agora squint Even though he paints them in color, Mi- Gallery, 530 West 25th Street from June 27 defiantly. chelet’s full length figures are similarly stark. through July 17. (Reception: Thursday, July Another Isolated on the canvas against an uninflect- 2, from 6 to 8 PM.) depicts ed, solid-colored background, these are not Michelet imparts to the human face and a black classically graceful, perfectly proportioned figure a strong emotional resonance. His man with female nudes. Rather, they are weathered facial compositions are usually executed a wry of flesh, pendulous of breast, awkward of monochromatically in acrylic and ink on and wary posture, as though caught off-guard. In canvas, while his full length figures are counte- one numbered series with the overall title in color, giving each a distinctly different nance, as “Maud,” the middle-aged model wears her feeling. Like Francis Bacon and Marlene L'hypothèse du portrait 4” though flesh like a lumpy overcoat. Dumas, Michelet often puts the human im- he has In one picture, she bends her knees as age through severe permutations that some learned to distrust life, yet employs irony as though attempting somewhat tentatively to might term grotesque. However, his work social armor. do an aerobic exercise that she is not limber is also possessed of a peculiar beauty, owing In another monochromatic painting, enough to manage. In another, she squats more to his handling of materials than to half of the male subject’s face is dissected with her hands on her knees as though to his seemingly somewhat grim view of the geometrically, disappearing mysteriously into relieve herself. In yet another, she is seen human condition. the black background like a cutaway mask. only from the breasts down, the folds of Michelet’s use of grissaille is especially But one gets the feeling that the anomaly her belly obscuring her sex. Their faces do expressive in his “L’hypothèse du portrait” is symbolic of a psychological state –– per- not show, but their bodies speak eloquently series, where large faces loom like ghostly haps a rigidness of character that makes the about the artist’s abiding empathy for our apparitions against solid black backgrounds, man less than complete –– rather than an shared mortal fate. –– Maurice Taplinger American Pen Women at Salamagundi Club ith twenty-five branches throughout the rescent colors. in her intricately wrought collages, where im- United States, the National League of Along with two black and white drawings ages of the Buddha, berries, egg-like forms and AmericanW Pen Women has been supporting projecting a strong sense of tensegrity, Laura ornate patterns merge and mirror each other, as and promoting women in art, letters and music M. Schiavina showed an acrylic/collage paint- in a cryptic looking glass. since 1897. Visual artists from the organiza- ing on canvas in which blue, silver, and black Then there is Myrna Harrison-Changar, tion’s New York City branch were featured forms interacted with collaged canvas strips in whose found object assemblages create poetic recently in “The Art Spirit,” a fine arts exhibi- a muscularly configured composition. little worlds that combine the box aesthetic of tion which was seen at Salmagundi Club, 47 Various postmodern approaches to abstrac- Joseph Cornell with a fanciful whimsy akin to Fifth Avenue. tion were seen in the work of several artists: Paul Klee. Lynn Vergano showed two watercolors in the Harriet Regina Marion’s two mixed-media Representational art also took a variety of Asian manner. “Ducks in Flight” captured two collages of cut and torn paper had an appeal foms: Julia A. Rogge paints as though with birds rising from a pond in fluid strokes, while at once poetic and emblematic. Michelle a brush dipped in sunlight in her sparkling “Cat Dance” depicted a fat feline extending one Bonelli’s colorful works in gouache and ink Central Park scenes, such as “Conservatory paw with winning economy and grace. on paper successfully combined fragments of Water,” and “Bethesda Fountain.” In Rhoda Barbara Yeterian, a popular teacher at the urban imagery, abstract cartoon vernacular à la Greif’s “Main Street USA,” colorful buildings Art Student’s League, was represented by Lichtenstein, and geometric precision. Miriam are piled up like layers of a birthday cake as a large expressionist oil on canvas from her Wills recycles Art Deco arabesques and other a truck passes with a big hotdog on its roof, “Dance Series,” as well as five small studies of rhythmic cursive forms to create sinuous suggesting a special place in the heart of the faces with brilliant color and vigorous, tactile compositions that maximize the potential of artist. Claire Clark reveals her own charmed brushwork. biomorphic abstraction. The oils on paper of vision in earthy glazed stoneware wall reliefs In her two oils “Rushing Triangle” and Leanne Martinson employ colorful gestural of sidewalk cafes in the city, rendering casual “Rushing Circles,” Nancy Miller combined strokes spliced and reassembled with collage to moments of snapshot reality immutale. Maria loose gestural strokes with submerged collage kinetically jog the compositional rhythms. Lipkin’s juicily painted oil “Salt Marsh III” matter to evoke an abstract sense of time and Although Anastasia Teper combines images evokes a heightened sense of place with yellow space in a range of soft blue, purple and pink of beautiful fashion models appropriated from wildflowers growing along the shoreline of hues. Miller’s paintings appear to allude to an the mass media with ribbons, burlap, tape, a luminous body of water and breeze-blown inner realm of personal epiphanies. and painted tic tac toe symbols in her large weeds in the foreground. By contrast, Nydia Although separately titled, E. Janya Barlow’s collages, such as “XOXO” and “Faces, Lines Preede bathes an entire landscape with a little two diamond shaped canvases, “Reflection 1” and Circles,” they merely serve as vehicles for stream flowing into verdant green abyss in and “Reflection 2” were joined, as in a diptych, abstractions as ruggedly tactile as those of the gemlike emerald hues, Barbara C. Thompson’s combining geometric forms with looser map- great Spanish painter Antoni Tapies. rhythmic strokes add energy to a landscape in like configurations in a manner of esoteric Arlene Egelberg also uses imagery in an ab- which bales of hay are illuminated by golden charts albeit enlivened by bright, almost fluo- stract context, albeit of a more esoteric nature, sunlight. ––––Maureen Flynn June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 19 ART ONLINE The Pure, Healthy Eroticism Richardo Angel Norte’s of Kathy Ostman-Magnusen Versatile Sculptural Vision recently saw a painting by Adolf Ziegler, one of Adolf Hitler’s ichardo Angel Norte, a Ifavorite artists and the president of the Reich Culture Chamber, Rsculptor trained at the the committee that seized works by Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, Academy of Art College in among other great artists of the twentieth century, and presented San Francisco whose work them as examples of decadence and can be seen on the website depravity in the notorious state-sponsored blingglamorous.com, may Nazi era exhibition “Degenerate Art.” be one of the last classical Zeigler’s realist oil depicts a pert young visionaries. Born in Frank- woman, barely out of puberty, with the furt, Germany, and raised in prerequisite perfect Aryan features, sitting Northern Virginia, he grew up passively on a divan, wearing nothing but in an artistic household and his From the Fused Glass Series a big bow in her blond tresses and dainty own aesthetic epiphany arrived ballet slippers on her feet. Like that Vic- upon his discovery of Michelangelo’s paintings at the Vatican, Rodin’s torian cause celebre “September Morn,” “Gates of Hell,” and the youthful figures of Donatello. this is a truly “dirty” picture, in that it Now settled in San Francisco, Norte’s approach appears to jibe coyly presents youthful innocence with sly with the theories put forth by Pierce Rice in his study “Man as salaciousness, poses covert seductiveness Hero,” in that he eschews the idiosyncratic approach to the figure “Primal 1” in the guise of unaffected purity. so prevalent today in favor of an idealization of the human body that By contrast, let us now consider the paintings of the contemporary harks back to the classical tradition. Indeed, Norte’s treatment of artist Kathy Ostman-Magnusen, a resident of California, whose nude the male nude harks back even further, to Greek antiquity, as seen in self portraits, which she has exhibited at Monkdogz Urban Art in New his bronze “Apollo’s Moon,” where the proportions of the athletic York City, can be seen on her website: kathyostman-magnusen.com. figure holding a lunar orb above his head are such that the sculpture Ostman-Magnusen is a woman with a wild, tawny mane who by transcends its relatively modest scale (32" high) to take on a monu- her own admission is “not in my 20s or 30s or 40s” and she makes mental presence. no secret of the pleasure she takes in her own well-preserved body. Another series of winged male nudes appears to focus on the myth Nor does she make concessions to the hypocritical mindset that of Icarus. (Given the innate idealism of Norte’s artistic mission to enables some people to go into an art gallery and pretend that they elevate the human figure at a time when its status in Western art has are regarding a beautiful unclothed human form strictly as an object been sadly degraded, would it be too much of a stretch to suggest of aesthetic delectation. that this particular myth may hold special meaning to him?) It’s pretty hard to keep up that kind of pretense anyway, when In any case, these bronze sculptures, partially eroded as though by one is looking at “Primal 1,” Ostman-Magnusen’s much larger than the ravages of time, are among his most powerful. Presenting them life, waist-length oil of herself throwing her head back in apparent on black granite pedestals, Norte employs various subtly colored ecstasy, as she runs a thick steel chain over one shoulder, between her patinas to imbue the figures with an almost painterly expressiveness. breasts, down her torso, and presumably between her legs. In one piece, the figure spreads his wings to take flight, while in If not in so many words, the artist explains that the chains, which another, presumably after flying too close to the sun and crashing to also play a prominent role in another nude portrait called “Primal earth, he lay broken beside his ruined wings. In yet another bronze, Decisions,” symbolize the ties that bind and stop us from experi- it would appear that Norte has given a new twist to the ancient myth, encing true freedom. But she admits “It’s about sex too though... by creating a hybrid man/bird figure rising like the phoenix on one of course it is,” and adds that her work is also about “embracing my avian leg and stretching out a majestic wing triumphantly. own desires.” Like the late great contemporary classicist Frederick Hart, Richardo Thus there’s no reason to deny the overt onanism of Ostman- Angel Norte also explores untraditional mediums, reprising elements Magnusen’s “Block Party” series, each consisting of a grid of nine of his major pieces, such as the 4x4x2" canvas blocks containing close-up images of the artist fon- torso of his “Apollo’s Moon,” in dling her own breasts or gently touching a red feather to her pubis. luminous kiln cast glass and add- No, there is nothing coy or covert about Kathy Ostman-Magnusen’s ing a magical aspect by backing paintings, which openly celebrate self-love and healthy adult sexuality. them with a Dichroic glass sheet And that is what makes them genuinely liberating works of erotic that glows when struck by direct art, while Adolf Ziegler’s painting is nothing more than thinly-veiled sunlight. pornography, calculated to appeal to the hidden Humbert Humbert Along with his heroic figures, in every outwardly respectable businessman and SS officer. Norte creates spiritually allusive However, as frankly erotic as as Ostman-Magnusen’s work is, it abstract compositions in fused actually does provide the sophisticated viewer with a great deal of flat glass with ethereal forms and purely aesthetic pleasure. For she has a way of making the light catch crystalline hues that reveal a more the tips of her tawny tousled mane, turning them as gold as a halo avant garde side to his creative against the rich dark backgrounds that she favors for many of her personality. Bearing intriguing titles compositions. Her skillful way with light and shadow also serves to such as “Melting Pink Pearls” these sculpt the curves of her body in lifelike chiaroscuro, while the fluidity pieces are often presented in deep of her brushstrokes, as well as the subtle hints of blue and red violet reflective-sided shadow boxes that From the Bronze Sculpture Series highlights that she blends into her flesh tones, lend her paintings an enhance their ethereal effect. Expressionist vitality akin to that of Edvard Munch. Along with biomorphic semiabstract sculptures such as the wit- Indeed, what truly distinguishes the paintings of Kathy Ostman- tily titled eyeball piece “Obvios Oculus,” and “Centurion Oculus” Magnusen, above and beyond their provocative subject matter, is that which was first introduced to New York audiences in “The Day After they reveal to even the virgin viewer that sensual pleasure and aes- Tomorrow” exhibition at Monkdogz Urban Art, they reveal the thetic delectation can often be one and the same. –– Ed McCormack winning versatility that may soon make Richardo Angel Norte a bi- coastal phenomenon. –– Wilson Wong 20 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 ART ONLINE The Moody Urban Art Noir of Karin Perez he late John Russell, who served for whose work appears to embody visually F. known in the dreamlike quality of her con- Tmany years as the chief art critic for Scott Fitzgerald’s famous statement: “In a tent. Thus she unites the formal with the both the The New York Times and The Sun- real dark night of the soul it is always three imaginative in compositions which initially day Times of London, called the modern city o’clock in the morning...” capture one’s attention through their pure “one of the great subjects of the twentieth Indeed, hand-drawn words (“drawn” as visual power, then hold it by virtue of their century,” and the same holds true for the opposed to “written,” since her large block poetic, thought-provoking imagery. twenty-first century as well. That said, few letters, like literal concrete poetry, are as And while Perez is a splendid painter, contemporary artists capture the darker substantial as her buildings) often appear adding a sensuous element to her precisely aspects of the urban mi- delineated architectural asma as atmospherically forms with smooth yet as the Israeli painter sumptuously pig- Karin Perez, whose mented surfaces, she work was featured is also one of precious recently in an exhibi- few contemporary tion at the Ico Gallery, artists who successfully in Tribeca, and can also integrate elements of be seen on her website, computer technol- karin-perez.com. ogy into her oeuvre The first thing that without diminishing strikes one about Per- its effect. In fact, her ez’s acrylic paintings on urban iconography canvas and mixed me- lends itself auspiciously dia works and prints in to digital imaging in the series she calls “Ur- prints where she blends ban Subjects / Gravity mixed media, photog- & Non Gravity” is their raphy, and computer powerful graphic qual- painting techniques in ity, apparently inspired a seamless synthesis. to some degree by the For rather than high contrast tones and attempting to slav- formal simplifications of ishly duplicate the stark Russian poster designs contrasts of her paint- of the 1920s and ’30s. ing style in her prints, In this regard, Perez she chooses to exploit seems a peer of artists “High Density” the new technology for such as Sue Coe, Eric Drooker, and Anton as integral elements of her compositions. its own unique qualities and capabilities, Van Dalen, all of whom emerged from the Some pose existential questions such as opening up the space in her compositions East Village scene of the 1980s and were “WHY NOT?” or “WHAT AM I?” Other and employing elements of superimposi- inspired by the funkier aspects of their then semiotic text fragments, such as “NO tion in prints such as “Exit,” where the pre-gentrified environment. GRAVITY ZONE,” suggest warning signs word of the title appears to float in midair Perez, however, has her own unique and in spooky sci-fi environments. The drawn amid complex layerings of architectural perhaps more far-reaching slant on city sub- letters in one painting –– in which a tiny structures. In her “Mixed series” in particu- jects, in her paintings and prints of locales red silhouette figure stands on a rooftop lar, photographic and computer painted from Manhattan to Tel Aviv. And her ap- overlooking an expansive vista of build- imagery merge most auspiciously, with sur- proach is more existential than social realist, ings, trestles, bridges, and other structures real juxtapositions of buildings and figures having stated that she is interested in “the –– declare poignantly, “JUST DON'T interacting rhythmically in deep space. individual in the urban environment, the WANT TO LEAVE.” In another painting, Especially notable, for its expression of the solitude in packed places” where “one is where a lone figure traverses a telephone visual cacophony, mazelike complexity, and always lonely, even when he is surrounded wire like a tightrope-walker high above psychological intensity of big city life, is by loved ones.” the blocky buildings of a dreary residential “Mixed series C,” a sequential triptych in The crisis of perpetual solitude is invari- complex, the block-lettering announces which one of her ghostly shadow figures, ably at the heart of Karin Perez’s art, “I THINK WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM.” bathed in the peculiarly eerie light of the wherein the human figure is reduced to an And in yet another, through the omission computer cosmos, traverses various sites isolated silhouette, slipping like a shadow of key words (but not the imposition of like the last man on earth, seeming to defy between the cracks of looming architec- the question mark one supplies mentally gravity and scale rooftops with supernatural tural monoliths. The sense of existential anyway), Perez ironically subverts the lyrics ease. dread is especially eerie in her acrylic of a Tom Waits song: “AND I THINK TO Here, as in all of her paintings and prints painting “High Density,” where the lone MYSELF...WHAT WORLD.” on this great theme, Karin Perez creates a silhouetted figure is outlined in red (as in Such wordplay harmonizes auspiciously vital visual metaphor for how we presently a “red alert”?) and dwarfed by grim gray with a visual inventiveness that combines live, strive, and dream in these high tech buildings set against a toxic red and orange and reconciles elements of the two modern hives that modern people call cities. sky. Like John Hultberg, who earned a art movements most diametrically opposed: well-deserved reputation as a maverick dur- Cubism and Surrealism. The influence ing the Abstract Expressionist era with his of the former is evident in Perez’s way of –– Ed McCormack paintings of strange terrains and haunted structuring her compositions architectur- landfills, Perez is a poet of desolation ally, while that of the latter makes itself

June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 21 Enrique Cubillas: Maestro of the Mortal Flower “ f modernity ended by trivializing painting called “Four Pears,” the Iits revolution (conspicuous novelty quartet of shapely fruits (one a deep, displacing creativity), it also has a new ripe shade of mottled green like a life awaiting it in a retrospective survey bronze patina, the others in lighter of what it failed to include in its sense natural hues), set against a subtle of itself.” purplish gray ground, suggested Guy Davenport authored those familial relationships. Here, too, the eloquent and wise words in a slender animating tension of the composition volume called “A Balthus Notebook,” was heightened by a sense of spatial in tribute to another painter. But they ambiguity, with the smallest of the might just as easily be applied to the four boldly delineated shapes appear- work of the Cuban American artist ing to alternately recede and advance Enrique Cubillas, whose retrospective on the picture plane the longer one exhibition of paintings from 1986 to engaged with the painting. the present was seen recently at Sutton In other paintings as well, Cubillas Art Gallery, 407 East 54th Street. rewarded prolonged scrutiny with For like Balthus, the exquisitely re- subtle optical effects, such as the al- fined painter of Nabokovian nymphets, most subliminal suggestion of stylized Cubillas, who paints floral still life with floral shapes in the vital red center of equal finesse (imparting to it a sensual- the large halved fruits and the exag- ity that is inarguably less expected) is geratedly jagged saw-tooth stripes on something of an anomaly amid the their green rinds in “Watermelons.” noisy, sometimes even shrill, despera- Then there was a fanciful, atmo- tion of today’s art scene. spheric landscape called “Field of Indeed, for a reviewer who attended Tulips,” in which a brilliant red carpet his opening reception at the tail end of of flowers, bordered on both sides a long afternoon of being bombarded by rows of verdant trees, flowed in by several of the more desperately shrill vanishing perspective toward distant spectacles in Chelsea, Cubillas’ oils on luminous mists. canvas, beautifully framed and seen in “Wild Orchid” Enrique Cubillas, who began his the elegant salon-like setting of Sutton In a previous review, I compared Cubillas’ artistic training at the Fine Arts Academy in Art Gallery, seemed an oasis of civilized handling of tonal contrasts to the candlelit Havana, Cuba, and continued it at the Art sophistication. Despite his genteel subject scenes of Georges de La Tour, and perhaps Students League after settling permanently matter and the traditional presentation of his one of the best examples of how he employs in New York City in 1961, cites both the Im- paintings, however, only a myopic philistine, light and dark areas in an almost sculptural pressionists and the Dutch masters of still life constitutionally incapable of discerning the manner can be seen in “Rembrandt Tulips,” as major influences on his work. However, subtle undercurrents in his compositions, another large oil on canvas in which deep red like the aforementioned Balthus, Cubillas could mistake Cubillas for a conservative and golden yellow petals take on the weight belongs to what Guy Davenport refers to as painter. and depth of rhythmically flaring bronze “the distinguished category of the unclas- For even in his earlier paintings in a more flames. Here, perhaps most dramatically, one sifiable.” And while he qualifies as a modern conventional still life format than that of sees how Cubillas conveys a sense of energy artist because he is a contemporary man the large close-ups of single flowers that and heroic scale comparable to that in an Ab- painting in the present century, it is the time- become a leitmotif of his later work there stract Expressionist canvas, albeit augmented less quality in his work which may yet reserve is a haunting resonance, hinting at subtexts by a formal rigor that can also be likened a special niche for him in art history. beyond what is immediately apparent. One to hard-edged abstraction. That he does –– Ed McCormack such work is “The White Dahlias,”a sublime so, however, without smallish oil in which Cubillas reveals his mas- abandoning allusive tery of chiaroscuro in the dappled areas of subject matter invests light and shadow that seem to move before his recent large paint- one’s eyes around the delicate flowers in the ings, their floral forms round glass bowl of water. Not only the few often as animated as fallen petals beside the bowl, but the lumi- the writhing figures nous blue auras in which the entire composi- of Delacroix, with “AWAKENING SPRING” tion is bathed, strike an elegiac note. a pregnant tension, A Fine Arts Exhibit In contrast to the tidings of mortality in founded on restraint, “The White Dahlias,” in a much larger, more that makes them all the West Side Arts Coalition recent oil called “Wild Orchid,” Cubillas more compelling. May 27-June 14, 2009 creates a sense of erotic turbulence with a The abstract under- Curator: Anne Rudder severely cropped composition in which fleshy pinnings of Cubillas’ white petals roil like ocean waves around the expressive realism also Participating Artists: golden stamens at their center. Here, too, came across strongly in Arthur Bitterman • Joseph Boss • Elizabeth K. Hill • Madi Lanier subtle pink and purple highlights on the some of the non-floral Linda Lessner • Emily Rich • Anne Rudder • Yukako fleshy white petals lend them a labial quality subjects that came and the overall sensual drama of the picture as pleasant surprises Broadway Mall Community Center Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island is heightened by the dark ground against in this retrospective Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm which Cubillas often sets his greatly enlarged exhibition. In an espe- floral forms. cially anthropomorphic [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

22 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 Ebip Serafedino’s Neo- Tachiste Chromatic Music achisme was the European answer to Abstract Expressionism. THowever, it developed independently, and had its own unique character, relying more on tactile surfaces created with thick dabs of color (tache being French for “spot” or “blotch”) than on loose gestures of the brush. Today, it is very possible that the leading postmodern practitioner of Tachisme, albeit updated with an element of Neo-Expressionism, is the Macedonia-born self-taught painter Ebip Serafedino, who lives in Montmartre, Paris, and whose New York exhibition can be seen at World Fine Art Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, from July 1 through 31. (Reception: Thursday, July 9, 6 to 8pm.) The first painting I remember seeing by Serafedino was a repro- duction on the Internet of an impressive work that had sold at auc- tion. It was called “Corrida d’amour,” and like most of Serafedino’s paintings it initially appeared abstract in a manner akin to the Jean- Paul Riopelle, until one saw the male and female figures half-hidden like shadowy phantoms within the thickly pigmented surface. Sud- denly –– ole!–– there they were, doing their courtship dance within the kinetically flickering multicol- ored strokes of color! At times, the purely ab- stract elements in Serafedino’s compositions dominate, as seen in a painting in the new exhibi- tion at World Fine Art entitled “Amour nocturne.” Here, one is immediately struck by the rich beauty of the colors: fleshy pinks, vibrant blues, brilliant yellows, olive greens, and subtle purples, dramatically punctuated by succulently glistening areas of nocturnal black. The opti- cal excitement that these colors “Deux Trompettes” screate, combined with the sheer sumptuous beauty of the strokes, laid down with a palette knife, is more than sufficient to evoke the sensuality suggested by the title. Indeed, Serafedino is a master of the palette knife, which he wields with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, and with which it is possible to build up unsullied layers of color purer and brighter than can be achieved with a brush. Serafedino employs this instrument with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel to create surfaces that fairly shimmer with light, as seen in the composition he calls “Sym- phonie,” where especially luminous concentrations of red, blue, yellow, and green sing out and make clear why the term “chro- matic” is often applied to color as well to as to music. For not only does Serafedino approximate sound with color, but as one gazes at this painting the variegated dabs of thick pigment that make up the overall grid of its ostensibly abstract surface gradually cohere pictori- ally. And, as if by magic, the figures of several symphonic musicians emerge from within the chromatic camouflage of the composition. A similar metamorphosis is accomplished in the more boldly compressed composition that Serafedino calls “Deux Trompettes,” where the dominant circular shapes and thick encrustations of harmonious color recall the swirling abstract forms of “Orphism” (as in the mythic musician Orpheus), a term the surrealist poet and art critic Appolinaire first applied to the early abstractions of Robert Delauney, which he felt could be likened to music. In Ebip Serafedino’s painting, however, the bold circular shapes become the heads of two musicians and the bells of their trumpets, while on an abstract level, the synthesis of rhythmically flowing forms and evocatively combined color is so successfully realized that one can almost imagine hearing the strident notes that the trumpet- ers are blowing. –– Maurice Taplinger

June/July/August 2009 GALLERY&STUDIO 23 When Graffiti Was King: Jack Stewart’s Long Awaited Book “ ack Stewart was an artist first and of millions of magazine I was writing for back then, but Jforemost,” Regina Stewart writes in her subway rid- I could tell that by that time he was more introduction to her late husband’s book ers.” comfortable in limousines. Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit We’ve all According to Regina Stewart, her Art of the 1970s. However, the need for seen it. Some husband believed that “when dealers a steady income led him to become an art of us among encouraged writers to work in a studio teacher and then an administrator in aca- that nutty environment, the writers ceased to make demia. When he became vice president and minority for graffiti and began making paintings of graf- provost of Rhode Island School of Design whom creative fiti. Graffiti simply became a subject, a still in 1975, it was ‘suggested’ that he acquire vitality has life. He believed that the dangers, the risk a Ph.D.” always counted of injury or death, as well as the thrill of So what, of all the possible exalted more than being chased by the police, were the most subjects suitable for a distinguished painter, neatness in important ingredients upon which the muralist, and art historian playing aca- the urban environment have even admired subway graffiti phenomenon fed, and this demic catch-up up, did Jack chose for his the funky grace of those big bubble-letters excitement electrified the pieces created on dissertation? Almost in the spirit of “I’ll and mused that the best of these kids could the trains.” show them,” it would seem, he decided to teach a lot of adult artists a trick or two. Illustrated with more than 275 full- hit them with a learned text entitled Mass But Jack Stewart, this cool dude who had color, previously unpublished photographs Transit Art Subway Graffiti: An Aesthetic studied with de Kooning at Yale Art School of entire car exteriors and, in some cases, Study of Graffiti on the Subway System of and made his own considerable reputation entire trains explosively illuminated by Taki New York City, 1970-1978. in the New York art scene but wore his 138, Lee, Slave 1, Movin Too, Taz, Stone An artist first and foremost, Jack Stewart eminence lightly, was the first grown-up Hi, the Fabulous Five, and numerous other actually saw aesthetic value in what most guy who actually took to the streets like graffiti masters, Jack Stewart’s book attests adults (except maybe Norman Mailer, but one of those intrepid youth gang work- to that electrified excitement. he didn’t count, being up for any existen- ers of the 1950s, to hang with the graffiti –– Ed McCormack tial tingle of thrilling lawlessness yet totally writers, and learn about their world and clueless when it came to visual art) then their work firsthand. He got to know Taki “LOST NEW YORK” thought of as vandalism, plain and simple: 183, who emblazoned his distinctive tag all Continued from pg. 8 low-rent kids, products of the tenements, over Washington Heights, Phase 2, Clyde a window guard clings to the outside of an housing projects, and welfare rolls, creep- (“King of the Buses”) and just about all the apartment building like a giant spider, or ing down into the tunnels and bombing other major writers. He learned all about how the monolithic, obsolete structure called the subway cars with cans of spray paint, “Wild-Style,” “3-D,” Cartoon,” and all “The 69th Street Transfer,” once used for often stolen, so that heading to work in the the other schools of lettering. He met with loading cars onto barges, now looms blackly morning one felt like one sardined into the the writers on the platforms and went out over the river like the mysterious ruins at very visceral bowels and entrails of some to the yards to watch them work, as they Stonehenge. Laurens McKenzie also finds snarling Day-Glo beast. created “whole train pieces,” which were mystery in inanimate subjects, as seen in her This mind you was way before Keith sort of the Sistine Chapels of graffiti art, somewhat ominous images of dark, empty Haring surfaced from the depths (where he and had them to his studio for artist-to- streets, barred portals, and blind industrial had been something of a slummer anyway, artist talks and more than 60 hours of windows with steel shutters. a facile art student from Pennsylvania run- taped interviews. (“Eventually we reached Then there is the show’s curator Jean Pry- ning with the homeboys) into the media an agreement,” Regina Stewart recalls. tyskacz, who not only finds witty juxtaposi- glare to be anointed by Tony Shafrazi and “If they would refrain from tagging Jack’s tions of imagery in lively urban scenes such other hipsters of High Kulchur. Stewart the paintings, and everything else in the studio, as “George & Abraham,” where two former first serious artist to really take this stuff se- we would donate the inside of the studio’s U.S. presidents, one in bronze, the other on riously, and his dissertation, posthumously bathroom door. They agreed and created a banner, appear to have a dialogue above the edited by Regina Stewart, and given a new a remarkable ancillary piece of New York heads of citizens gathered on some municipal name more in keeping with its anything- City subway graffiti. There are more than steps. But Prytyskacz, also reminds us, in but-academic readability, for publication as 190 tags on the door.”) “Saint Paul’s Church,” its steeple framed by a book by Melcher Media/Abrams, New By the time he finished his research, bare, calligraphic tree limbs, that “Lost New York, is the first serious history of it. Stewart had become such a scholar of New York” can still ambush one with visions of Jack Stewart takes large-scale urban York subway graffiti that he could pinpoint sudden beauty. –– Seymour Frank American graffiti writing from its humble its major movements in chapter headings origins in the mid-1960s in two adjacent such as “The High Period: 1972 to 1973” Philadelphia neighborhoods where rival and “The Synthetic Period: 1974,” and white and black gangs used it as “territorial critique particular talents in sentences like, markers” and warnings (“White Power”) “While Tracy was using Wild Style frac- (“Do Not Enter”) to its art for art’s sake tured letters, Mark was softly romantic. His Renaissance in the subways of Manhattan distinctive style seemed closer in mood to in the 1970s. While simple “nickname graf- Art Noveau than to anything else painted fiti” had long existed in many large cities, on the trains in 1978.” mainly on walls and in playgrounds in the Once, in the 1980s, after graffiti had poorer neighborhoods, during that vaunted graduated from the subways to the galler- decade, according to Stewart, a baroque ies, the late Keith Haring acted like it was a new species of urban calligraphy made serious imposition when I insisted that we its way down into the subways, where it take a ride on the IRT so he could show “altered the environment of New York me how he began. He agreed because City and left its mark on the consciousness he wanted to be in the mass circulation 24 GALLERY&STUDIO June/July/August 2009 A Summer Exhibition of Gallery Artists Carlos Artime Enrique Cubillas Richard Dziuba Lynne Friedman Jama John McGiff Perez Melero Ritchard Rodriguez Angel Uranga and others Call for information SUTTON ART GALLERY 407 East 54th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022 Tel. 212 753 0884 Cell 917 544 6846 Tues - Fri 11am - 6pm [email protected]

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