SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 13 NO. 1 New York GALLERY&STUDIO , 1961–65. Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graffito on lightly textured white wove paper , 1961–65. Watercolor, Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon faced on ¼-inch thick laminated gray cardboard, 56 x 39 5⁄8 in. (142.2 99 cm). Karen and Kevin Kennedy Collection. Why Robert Gober’s Charles Burchfield Show at the Whitney Matters So Much pg. 12
MORE MAX’S KANSAS CITY MADNESS FROM ED MCCORMACK, Pg. 19 VINCENT ARCILESI THE RHYTHM OF COLOR - 42” x 18”
“Venus at the Roman Forum” - 09, oil on canvas, 78" x 60"
LEE CHABOT Abstract Conception Arcilesi in Rome - SANDY FRAZIER YUTA STREGA
October 19–November 7, 2010 Lee Chabot
© CORDES YORIO Reception: Tuesday, October 19, 5–8 pm OCTOBER 5 - OCTOBER 26, 2010 Reception: Thursday, October 7, 6 - 8 pm
530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York Broome Street Gallery 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 498 Broome Street, New York, N.Y. 10013 www.Agora-Gallery.com Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm 212 226 6085 [email protected]
GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Photographs by Paintings by Nam Chun Cho Kwija L. Cho
October 4 - 29, 2010 Reception: Thursday, October 7, 6 - 8 pm
INTERNATIONAL CENTER in New York, Inc. 50 West 23rd Street, 7th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010 212 255 9555 Gallery Hours Mon. - Thurs. 11am - 8pm • Fri. 11am - 7pm • Sat. 9:30am - 3:30pm
Brigitte Reggie Andrea October 19th–30th 2010 Mixed Opening Reception: Thursday October 21, 6–8 pm Media Gallery Hours: Featuring: Tuesday - Saturday 11am–6pm Andrea Shapiro New Century Artists, Inc. Brigitte Schlachter 530 West 25th Street, Suite 406, 4th Floor Reggie Lerman New York, N.Y. 212 367 7072 ASIAN ARTS & CRAFTS
Coming Next Issue: Offering a variety of artifacts Another excerpt from depicting Lord Ganesh Visit our store Ed McCormack’s memoir and a rich MAILBOXES assortment of & BEYOND INC. Hoodlum Heart Asian specialty A full supply of shipping items and needs and services antiques. 217 East 85th St. [email protected] New York, NY 10028 Tel 212 772 7909
The GALLERY&STUDIO advertising deadline for the November/December/January issue is October 4 for color, October 11 for black/white. For subscription information, call 212 861 6814 or visit www.galleryandstudio.com Time to Say Yes to “No!art” uring the summer months, a time of casually curated group shows that Dare often the art world version of garage sales, historically significant solo exhibitions are a relative rarity in commercial galleries. For this reason, a bracingly nasty selection of early work by Boris Lurie (1924-2008) at Westwood Gallery, 568 G S Broadway, in June and July, was a welcome treat. & Lurie, a young survivor of Hitler’s concentration camps (his grandmother, Highlights
On the Cover: Artist/curator Robert Gober ferries forgotten master Charles Burchfield from the murky backwaters of Regionalism into the modernist mainstream, pg. 12 Plus: More memories of Max’s notorious Back Room from a former inmate, pg. 19
mother, and sister weren’t as lucky) who arrived in New York in 1946, was one of the originators, along with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, of “No!art,” a grass roots movement that was an early 1960s precursor of New Wave, Punk, and other transgressive later movements. Their “Doom” and “Vulgar” shows at the March Gallery brought funky tidings of East Village Future to the 10th Street gallery scene. But like Wallace Berman’s West Coast Beat tribe, they were too hot for the art establishment of their time to handle. Today, Lurie’s altered porno photomontages, pinup collages, weird shoe fetish sculptures (like his colleague Goodman’s shit sculptures) click right into the zeitgeist. –– The Editors
Anne Kolin, pg. 5 Out of the Archives at CFM, pg. 8 von Schmidt, pg. 20 GALLERY&STUDIO An International Art Journal Bob Tomlinson, pg. 21 PUBLISHED BY ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected]
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen Vincent Arcilesi, pg. 17 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn
www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com Michéle Vincent, pg. 24 2 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 3 Abstract Allusions: The Métier of Francis Dosne was primed for Francis small semi-translucent squares of color set IDosne’s present retrospective against a vibrant blue field. Subdued blues, at Pleiades Gallery by his earlier purples, and smaller areas of green, form a exhibition this past Summer backdrop for brighter red and deep yellow at the Manhattan Graphics hues that, together, emit a heat similar to Center in Tribeca. That smaller that which emanates from the burnished show of Dosne’s silk screen flesh tones in the nudes of Modigliani. prints, with their precise yet Spilling down from the upper right fluid linear forms, luminous corner of the composition and sweeping stained glass colors, and sublime horizontally across its center, these brighter formal compositions, focused shapes evoke the sense of a reclining figure on an essential aspect of his as palpable as that in Goya’s “Naked oeuvre. What it demonstrated Maja.” Yet, that Dosne magically conjures most clearly was the European the curvaceous contours of the courtesan modernist roots of this versatile “Odalisque Squared” (as well as a suggestion of her reflection in a contemporary sculptor, been best known to many of us. mirror in the upper left area of the canvas) printmaker, and painter, who was born in Although Dosne had the good fortune, with sharp-edged, stringently geometric Troyes, France, but settled in the United as a young man in Paris in the ’40s, shapes, removes even the smallest hint of States, where he studied at the Art Students of studying with Fernand Léger, his salaciousness from the composition. League in the early 1960s. prowess as a painter has been somewhat Although there are several other reasons Dosne’s bio tells us that he also joined underplayed up to now. Since his great to savor this show, one of the most novel the studio of René Lavaggio, in the 1980s, modernist teacher also abstracted from is that, in “Odalisque Squared,” Dosne to perfect his stone carving technique, then female anatomy, the Leger connection accomplishes the formidable task –– rare carved local marble at Dellatolas Marble comes to mind particularly in relation in odalisques, which traditionally depict Studio, in Tinos, Greece, and in New to Dosne’s oil on canvas “Odalisque beautiful concubines and harem slaves York City, “eventually made the Sculpture Squared.” However, the question of ––– of finally making the viewer regard the Center School and Studios, where he influence is irrelevant here; for while female nude as a purely formal entity. was on the board of directors, his artistic Leger’s tubular-limbed nudes remain –– Ed McCormack home.” And indeed it is as a sculptor, largely recognizable, as its title indicates particularly concerned with the play of light Dosne takes abstraction much further into Frances Dosne, Pleiades Gallery, 530 West 25th and shadow on smoothly flowing concave the realm of pure geometry. Street, 4 fl., September 7 thru October 2. and convex forms, that Dosne has long His composition is made up entirely of Reception: Saturday, September 11, 3 to 6 pm. Mexican Painter Marcela Cadena’s Vibrant Vision rom the evidence of the work to be at the bottom, patches here and there in the manner of Fseen in her upcoming exhibition at separated by pentimento. “Alma de Color” is a subtly Agora Gallery in Chelsea, Marcela Cadena, a staggered sumptuous painterly tour de force. who has already exhibited extensively and black and Similarly forceful in execution and who was also featured at Art Shanghai in white impact is “El Hombre,” in which the pièce China earlier this year, is among the best “horizon de resistance is the slightly asymmetrical and brightest of the present generation of line.” linear outline of a roughly inscribed brown young Mexican artists. However, as in rectangle occupying the center of the Often working with a spatula, Cadena the case of the composition like an almost empty picture applies oil and acrylic pigments to canvas older painter, frame. (One might cite here a suggestion in bold, sometimes barely modulated areas even when of a witty young female artist’s wry take of color. Favoring bright hues because, as organized on the male principle, although such she puts it with characteristic directness along the lines interpretations are always subjective when it “Mexico is a colorful country,” she sees of landscape, comes to abstract painting!) “El Hombre” abstraction as a conduit for emotions that Cadena’s large Then there is “Entre Suenos,” where resist verbal translation. But one should not canvases invariably appear more numinous an uninflected yellow field at the top of be deceived by the brilliance of her colors than earthbound. the canvas is intersected by looser area of into thinking that all of the emotions in Distinctly more “busy” than the vertically streaked aqueous purple scored Cadena’s paintings are uniformly happy, previous work in painterly terms is an and scraped where the two colors meet in a since she also cites the deaths of loved ones in oil and acrylic on canvas titled “Alma manner suggesting splashing surf. as having influenced her work. Obviously, de Color.” Its central motif is an inner In other paintings as well, such as the however, she does not abide by the cliché rectangle consisting of multiple rough majestic “Inundando el Silencio,” where that only mournful colors can express loss, horizontal strokes of frosty white impasto luscious areas of red and anxious strokes seeking instead to take the path of spiritual inflected with purple and set against a of yellow bleed faintly as reflections on ice transcendence. brilliantly “breathing” blue ground. While down onto a pure white ground, Marcela In some paintings, she tends to divide forming a solid border around the edges Cadena reveals her subtle mastery that makes the composition into horizontal color of the canvas, this blue hue, bolstered by one eager to keep up with her auspiciously areas, a pictorial strategy that recalls a narrower strip of equally uninflected promising career. –– Peter Wiley Rothko, particularly in some of her more deep purple at the bottom of the canvas, spare paintings, such as “Entre Colores,” is almost entirely dispersed by the white Marcela Cadena, Agora Gallery, 530 West an oil on canvas consisting of a red gestural strokes that dominate the center 25th Street, September 10–Oct 1. rectangle at the top and a deep yellow one of the composition, showing through in Reception: September 16, 6-8 PM. 4 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Anne Kolin Captures the Visual Cacophony and Crazy Simultaneity of the Postmodern City raffiti has no doubt been a feature of wall scrawled with the message “Mort aux that can sound like an angry altercation Gcities for as long as they have existed. Juifs: Jews Go Home.” starting up right beside one on the There is something about a blank wall that The sense of violence to which Kolin crowded sidewalk!); and the myriad other cries out to be defaced, be it with a political alludes is perhaps most immediately assorted aural assaults upon pedestrian slogan, a personal message, a sexual, racial, evident in her painting “Le Cri (The sensibility that put the real-life teeth of or religious slur, or the often artful “tags” Shout),” where the grimacing face of the street in the mouth of the media term with which rebellious adolescents emblazon a man with eyes and mouth agape, as “sound bites” in a city –– we’re talking every available surface to make the primal though screaming an epithet, has as New Yawk right now –– where a normal declaration “I am!” form of address has become, “Yo, what’s Despite signs that warn “post no your problem, asshole?” bills,” in big modern cities like New Yet that walls can exhilarate, as well as York or Paris empty walls become attack, is also made splendidly evident in free advertising spaces, with posters Anne Kolin’s new solo show at Noho, plastered one upon the other by in paintings that celebrate the sensuous intrepidly enterprising smalltime visual cacophony of colors and textures, entrepreneurs willing to risk fine or the complex ecriture of signs and arrest in order to get their messages symbols, the psychedelic arabesques, out to the public. Inevitably, these baroque or blocky letter-forms, the urban walls scrawled and pasted furtively scribbled confessions and with successive messages of protest, poignant statements of selfhood that obsession, malice, selfhood, or the artist finds so telling. For how could commercial ambition, are attacked by even the most pugnacious urban asshole random vandals, rival advertisers, and argue with that lovely French term the ravages of weather. Cheap paper “Noblesse Oblige,” the name of another cracks and peels, fugitive inks fade in new painting in a stately elongated sunlight or dissolve and run in rain, format, even when that lovely phrase revealing palimpsests and pentimento is ironically underlined in smaller type buried beneath layers of time. by the more hectoring admonishment It is the “traces of memory” on “Privilege entails responsibility”? such walls, “like scars on skin,” that Besides, Kolin’s paintings are possessed fascinate and inspire the French artist of such quintessentially French finesse Anne Kolin in her new solo exhibition, –– albeit informed by tachisme and “Wall Side Story,” at Noho Gallery. spiced by a rougher, funkier energy akin “My works tell the story of my to that of Rauschenberg and Twombly life, my city, my cities, Paris and –– that it might take a millisecond or New York, essentially,” Kolin says, two for some viewers to discern the affirming the interest that she shares muddy, masklike, art brut faces of with her late countryman Roland “Le Cri” (The Shout) victimhood half buried in the thickly Barthes in semiology, the science of grotesque an effect as one of the British impastoed skin of the pigment. Likewise, in signage, particularly in a contemporary painter Francis Bacon’s screaming popes. the case of another painting as gorgeously, urban context, as she speaks passionately His head emerges, as if from a pyramid- lividly red-drenched as Soutine’s flayed of her peripatetic daily outings in either shaped mental landfill, from a mass of beef carcasses, enigmatically titled “Je Veux of her cities, taking in, like an aesthetic other photographic fragments, snippets of Mourir Vivant,” one might be so dazzled archaeologist, the posters, the graffiti, the typography, and bits of torn poster –– one as to momentarily overlook the bold entrepreneurial yearnings, the personal showing half the grinning mouth of what crisscrossed black and yellow stickers that angst of her fellow citizens. appears to be that evil-looking clown (so read, “Humans Not Permitted.” “On the walls of our cities, the history of like Batman’s villainous enemy The Joker) Another possibility is that in a our lives inscribes itself,” the artist asserts. on the logo of Steeplechase Park in Coney particularly sumptuous production called “All that urban space speaks to me, amazes Island. Gaudy Day-Glo spray-can graffiti “Porte de Clignancourt,” one could get me, and recalls other thoughts. Some tags, spatters of visceral red, suggesting so caught up in the visual relationships words call out to me; walls become large the aftermath of a shooting, and rivulets between an elegantly distressed partial open books with pages reciting at times of shiny black enamel bleed down onto a Perrier label, big black block letters that poetry, at times violence. lusciously scumbled sandy-colored painterly say “PARIS D’ AMOUR,” a comic strip In the latter regard, Kolin recalls reading ground laid down with vigorous abstract femme fatale, and myriad other intriguing about the greeting that was extended expressionist panache and stenciled in fragments as to momentarily lose sight to the French-speaking, Egyptian-born scarlet with the lowercase phrase “le cri of the sheer painterly felicity with which Jewish writer Edmond Jabes, who had assourdissant” –– the deafening cry. Anne Kolin pulls all the disparate elements written so movingly about the persecution Here, Kolin’s visual cacophony together in a richly satisfying composition. and displacement of Jews down through approximates the deafening cry of the city: But that’s just a risk that the adventurous history, and was finally forced by the the shrill wailing of sirens and ambulances; viewer will have to take.–– Ed McCormack widespread anti-Semitism in Egypt to the flung out curses of angry cabbies and take exile in France in 1957. Shortly truck drivers raging through the roaring, after arriving in Paris, Jabes was strolling gaseously exhaust-farting, honking rush Anne Kolin, through the Odeon quarter one evening hour traffic; the bleat of police whistles; the Noho Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, when he was brought up short before a sudden, startling sonic blast of rap (music from October 5 to 30 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 5 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, Inc. “CAPTURING OUR NEIGHBORHOOD, THE WEST SIDE” Fine Arts Exhibit September 22–October 10, 2009 Opening Evening: September 22 Judith Davidoff performing music by West Side composers Curators: Carson Ferri-Grant & Anne Rudder SONIA BARNETT • RICHARD CARLSON • NATE LADSON CARSON FERRI-GRANT • ANTHONY KIROV ANNE RUDDER • HELEN STUTZ • PATIENCE SUNDARESAN Broadway Mall Community Center Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm ^ZHJU`'^ZHJU`VYN ^^^^ZHJU`VYN
ANN CHERNOW
“BAD GIRLS” DERRICK GUILD:
OCTOBER 7–21, 2010 After Eden
Opening: September 18 – October 13, 2009 Thursday, October 7, 6–8 pm
“Easy to Pick Up”, aquatint/etching, Up”, aquatint/etching, “Easy to Pick 14 7/8 x 11 7/8" edition of 20 Fully illustrated catalog available 2/20 GALLERY Allan Stone Gallery 220 West l6th Street, New York City, N.Y. 10011 113 East 90th Street, NYC 10128 Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday 2–7:00 pm Tel. 212.987.4997 Fax. 212.987.1655 Phone: 212 807-8348 Website: 220gallery.net G&S Classifieds opportunities THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all •Learn how to use your body corrrectly. geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. •Improve your posture. Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, •Achieve lasting results. email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, A hands-on redirecting of the mind and body that has been used successfuly for over a century. Learn PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & how to use your body in a more efficient way which will have far-reaching benefits. It involves changing Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. old habits and learning new ones to last a lifetime. Please call for a private consultation and introductory lesson. Union Square studio, or house and office calls available. Limited Introductory Offer: Consultation, CUSTOM PICTURE FRAMING for artists and galleries. Museum quality, selected frames & photo analysis, intro lesson plus free additional lesson. Sliding scale available. mats. Float & dry mounting, canvas stretching. Jadite Galleries, 662 10th Ave. (betw. 46/47 Sts.) DIANA MULLMAN, AmSAT. 212-734-7875 Hours: 12 - 6 pm, Free delivery in Manhattan. 212-977-6190 [email protected]
MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY is reviewing artist portofolios for its new Chelsea Gallery. National and International artists are invited to submit. Sase, slides, photos and brief Gelabert Studios artist bio. Send to: Montserrat Contemporary Art Gallery, 547 West 27 Street, NYC 10001 Gallery NY ART MAGAZINE seeks experienced advertising rep to help expand advertising base beyond offers artists the opportunity to showcase their work in a unique, galleries to include art related cliental. Generous commission. elegant Upper West Side setting. Fully equipped gallery for rent email: [email protected] on weekly or yearly basis. Top quality lighting. Call 212-874- 7188 for rental details or visit our website: NOHO GALLERY is viewing portfolios in all media for our Chelsea location. Visit nohogallery.com www.gelabertstudiosgallery.com. Gelabert Studios Gallery,
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 7 “Out of the Archives II”: a Unique Auction Shares rue connoisseurship –– which is to say, by scrupulously insisting that all of his signed woodblock prints from Dali’s Tthe appreciation of works of art from original prints are signed in pencil by the “Divine Comedy”; (2) Selected original any era for their innate aesthetic qualities master’s own hand and accompanied signed lithographs by several artists for –– would appear to be a dying enterprise in by letters of authentication from their “Variations sur l’Amour”; (3) Selected today’s art scene, where so many trend- publishers. As for Fini, with whom he original prints from “L’Apocalypse de hungry gallery and museum directors are became close friends in her later years, Saint Jean,” the great French art publisher, driven solely by the the cult of the new he has not only amassed a vast personal Joseph Foret’s legendary “most expensive and the question of taste is rarely raised. If collection of her works, but has presented book in the world” (a copy of which this makes Neil Zukerman, the director of several major exhibitions of this preeminent Zukerman recently donated to the planned CFM Gallery, something of an anomaly, woman surrealist, recently the subject of Leonor Fini museum, in Paris); (4) Selected so be it. Zukerman, who refuses to regard Peter Webb’s major biography, “Sphinx: original prints, drawings, and paintings by art as a game of historical one-upmanship, The Life and Art of Leonor Fini.” various artists acquired over the years. boycotted the Whitney for many years, Given how reluctant Zukerman is to part Although Zukerman had not as yet made after the institution affronted him with with anything by Fini, whom he particularly all of his final selections at the time of our Carl Andre’s “Six Bricks in a Row.” In values for her unique combination of visit, sufficient examples were available to fact, he didn’t set foot in another trendy superb draftspersonship and unfettered give one a fair idea of the auction’s scope contemporary art museum until he went imagination, it should surprise no one and depth. to MOMA recently for the Tim Burton who knows him that none of her works The woodblock prints for “The Divine
Dietrich Schuchardt Salvador Dali Walter Girotto Félix Labisse exhibition. But he’ll have you know that are included in CFM Gallery’s upcoming Comedy” that Dali based on a series he barely glanced at the two naked sentries exhibition and auction “Out of the Archives of watercolors for Dante’s epic poem guarding the door, as he exited through the II.” However, this auction––only the (the production of which the artist Marina Abramovic exhibition. second Zukerman has held in his entire personally supervised, giving final approval Not that Zukerman has anything against career as an art dealer––does include an for each print before the blocks were naked bodies, you understand; quite the intriguing related item: “Leonor Fini,” destroyed) were among our favorites. In contrary, eroticism pervades the surrealist a Bruegel-like drawing of the artist, a bold, flowing style and luminous colors and symbolist works that he collects by apparently surrounded by fawning acolytes, retaining the freshness of the watercolor artists living and dead. But it’s just too by Stanislao Lepri, with whom Fini medium, Dali gives us his inimitable ironic to see what he calls “the emperor’s one time lived in a ménage à trois with interpretation of “Purgatory,” “Paradise,” new clothes” embodied so literally! Constanine Jelenski. and the “Inferno,” each a fantastic visual Exquisite taste in the type of art that he (Estimated value: $8,750 –– starting bid counterpart to the poet’s literary wit. In collects and extolls, as well as the willingness $3,500) his “Purgatory,” (obviously the agonizing to fight for it, has made Zukerman a way station on which the waiting room of formidable foe of a myopic cultural When Jeannie and I visited him in his the Motor Vehicle Bureau was modeled), establishment bent on ignoring figurative cozy Hobbit-hole of a book-lined office, hollow-eyed souls clutch each other as painting and sculpture that is passionate the perennially black-clad gallerist (“It they await judgment, or plead their case rather than ironic. Ever since opening his eliminates wasting time trying to decide to a towering, white-gowned magisterial gallery in Soho 1992, to the present in what to wear every morning”) told us that being brandishing a gnarled staff. In his new space in Chelsea, he has been, to the auction will be broken down in four his “Paradise,” the angelic ones strike borrow Ezra Pound’s memorable phrase, categories: (1) Selected original pencil- bodacious diva-like poses with flowing “kicking against the pricks.” And not only robes and scarves amid shafts of light and has he succeeded in getting gifted living CFM Gallery, 236 West 27th St., 4th Fl. clouds that billow like stage-smoke. Or else artists like Anne Bachelier, Eileen Fields, and Auction dates: September 15–October 15 they prance, preening in their new wings Michael Parkes at least some degree of the Clicking on images on CFM website like rainbow-colored peacocks on stilts. recognition they so rightfully deserve; he (www.cfmgallery.com) brings up an eBay Characteristically, Dali allows them to retain has also been the most effective posthumous page for bidding on all works in auction. their human vanity even in Heaven! champion of those twin surrealist terrors, Bids can also be placed directly through One “Inferno” image, “A Devil Salvador Dali and Leonor Fini. the gallery. Selected works will be on Logician,” is truly harrowing, depicting In the case of Dali, Zukerman has won display at CFM and all pieces are available a pair of the huddled damned hurrying the trust of prominent collectors worldwide for viewing during business hours. past a gigantic monolithic monster with a 8 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 the Wealth of a Collector/Gallerist’s Exquisite Taste detached erect penis and scrotum thrust elegantly hand-scripted text, its harmonious into a vaginal opening in the center of its marriage of drawing and calligraphy head and a pair of human legs hanging, like comparable in its own way to Asian an enormous tongue, from its gaping maw. scroll painting and the illuminated poem (Estimated value: $2,400 –– starting bid manuscripts of William Blake. This seems an $900.) especially auspicious signature piece for the doubly gifted Cocteau who did much of his Among the signed original lithographs writing in his sketch books. from “Variations sur l’Amour,” that other (Estimated value: $4,500 –– starting bid great Livre d’Artiste celebrating the many $900) faces of love, we were especially taken with “Les Miracles,” a brilliantly colorful image Although Zukerman tends to prefer by the wonderfully quirky self-taught more adamantly figurative artists, it is not surrealist Félix Labisse, depicting two difficult to see why he made an exception willowy but full-breasted bright blue female in the case of André Masson and Ossip nudes with deadpan expressions, posed Zadkine, both of whom retain an element frontally against a background of nocturnal of allusiveness in even their most abstract hills and crashing surf. compositions. And further proof of his catholic taste within the very definite Fini by Stanislao Lepri
Massimo Rao Pierre-Yves Trémois Alex Gardega André Masson Lucien Coutaud
(Estimated value: $1,200 –– starting bid perimeters that he has established as both a $350) collector and a gallerist, can be seen in the final, miscellaneous category of the auction. The esteemed surrealist printmaker Lucien For here, the choices include oils, drawings, Coutaud, who once stated that “Nothing and original graphics ranging from latter- looks more like a pair of buttocks than an day Surrealists like Steve Cieslawski, Mark apricot,” also caught our eye with a piece Davet, Michel Henricot, and Dietrich called “Quatre Mille Nuits.” For here, Schuchardt; to Neo-Symbolists like the late Coutaud seems to prove his point explicitly Massimo Rao, Walter Girotto, Gerard Di- with an image of an actual tree bearing Maccio, Mersad Berber, and Lorraine Vail; sensual fruit and sprouting from the ripe to Neo-Classisists such as Alex Gardega nude torso of a quite literally “topless” and Jurgen Gôrg; to the unique Art Deco woman who appears to be walking on water. descendant Jean-François Ibos, as well (Estimated value: $1,2,00 –– starting bid as blue-chip masters such as Giorgio de $350) Chirico, Franz von Stuck and Ernst Fuchs, among others. Another personal favorite was “L’Aveugle Neil Zukerman has always maintained le Plus Que Vêtue,” a characteristically that he would never sell a work of art that refined image in white line on a brown he himself would not wish to own. And ground of an idealized couple embracing, anyone who has ever sat with him in his by Pierre-Yves Trémois, a French sculptor office as he showed and extolled the works Jean Cocteau and graphic artist known for his lyrical for an upcoming exhibition –– and actually eroticism. seen him, on more than one occasion, make (Estimated value: $1,200 –– starting bid a split-second decision to purchase a piece $350) for his own collection –– can attest to a passion that goes far beyond the bottom In terms of its sheer linear elegance, line. This auction of some of his most we were also mightily impressed by prized acquisitions over the years attests to Jean Cocteau’s remarqued etching for a level of connoisseurship that has become “L’Apocalypse,” featuring a fanciful increasingly rare in today’s art world. Picassoid facial profile juxtaposed with an –– Ed McCormack Michel Henricot SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 9 Sampling the Wonders of a Lively Salon Show y its very nature a kind of sampler, the Mentor,” three apparent acolytes gather many of Lanier’s works, the interplay of BWest Sid Arts Coalition’s recent “Salon around a seated man who seems the center line and color produces an engaging formal Show,” curated by Linda Lessner and of attention, the axis on which they orbit, effect on the picture plane, even while Carolyn Reus offered a plethora of unrelated even when they look away casually. convincingly evoking foliage, chiaroscuro, pleasures. Robin Goodstein’s oil on canvas and natural vitality. Among them were “Fauna,” an etching by “Pythagorean Theorem” translates one Marianne V. McNamara has long Robert Scott in which sinuous linear swirls of the earliest mathematical theories of been one of our most accomplished suggested a variety of organic metaphors, triangulation known to ancient civilization urban maximalists, using pen and ink such as leaves morphing into birds, sans and a source of philosophical inspiration to skillfully delineate the life of the city. specific imagery. Instead Scott’s rhythmic, for both Plato and Aristotle into a dynamic Here, McNamara outdid herself in “Little gracefully organized composition left much abstract composition. Linking Euclidean Houses,” her detailed, brick by brick to the viewer’s imagination, à la abstract geometry to contemporary aesthetics, depiction of a wide variety of building surrealism of André Masson. Goodstein sets variously colored form afloat facades, windows, fire-escapes, and David Ruskin, one of very few around the periphery of a vibrantly pulsing storefronts forming an abstract grid. photographers who still hand-colors his red field. Emily Rich can employ loose washes with pictures, gave us his own unique take on Fervent paternal feeling is evoked in Nate a wet-in-to-wet boldness and fluidity that The Gates installation in Central Park. Ladson’s accomplished realist oil “A Father’s recalls Emil Nolde, as she demonstrated in Filtering Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Love.” That it happens to be a man of color her vibrant composition “Wild Flowers.” conceptual rigor through his own misty lens, who hugs the child to his breast suggests the But she can also delineate landscape in a Ruskin made the shadowy figures traversing even more urgent sense of protectiveness more muscularly tactile manner, as seen in the rows of billowing cloth evoke spiritual that some fathers must feel toward their the rugged vigor of her oil “Maine Coast.” pilgrimages and Tibetan prayer flags. offspring, in a world where racism is still so In two acrylic paintings simply titled Anthony Kirov’s mixed media paintings prevalent, even while Ladson renders the “Abstract” Jutta Filippelli showed a mastery conjure up fanciful realms where lovers scene poignantly universal. Photographer of form, gesture, and color that has always embrace in a park or an idling flute player Carolyn Reus, on the other hand, makes a been evident, if not quite as pronounced, in dressed like a jester plays a flute beside a more lighthearted statement on the origins her more figurative mode. Here, one saw lake, as if serenading a woman in a distant of maternal love without descending to the a different aspect of her artistic sensibility, boat. Kirov’s idyllic scenes are enhanced by saccharine in her delightful digital color particularly in one composition where the his meticulously stylized technique and the print of a little girl hugging a puppy. Reus pièce de resistance was Filippelli’s handling of vibrant ribbons of color that envelope his also celebrates friendship on its most humble the interaction between areas of rusty yellow buoyant compositions. and brick red with sinuous linear elements. Abstract color construction takes on Broadway Mall Community Center, Ron Caldwell’s two mixed media works, chromatic lusciousness in the acrylic 96th Street and Broadway, Center Island sharing the title “Sentence,” were composed paintings of Joseph Boss. The titles of his of vertical strips of painted wood of different “Chaotic Elements” and “A Run in the level in her print of two other canines lengths assembled to form compositions Fields” underline the sense of freedom convening on a tiled floor, suggesting suggesting horizontal totems. From a that his exuberant compositions project. the simple joys that domestic animal distance one could take in their overall Yet there’s nothing “chaotic” about the companions can bestow on us all. qualities, while up close they yielded a arrangement of Boss’s patches of muted Carson Ferri-Grant is an artist with fascinating array of colorful abstract and pinks, tans, and crimsons which are a rare ability to conjure up a certain figurative imagery. anchored by a underlying grid. monumentality with unexpected materials, Frequent exhibitor Margo Mead has Although Herb Fogelson is a judging from his installation of small, lately been exploring elegantly mysterious photographer, his atmospheric black and connected color pencil sketches of floral figurative compositions, in which classically white photos and digital color prints have forms on sheets of paper that appear to formed male and female nudes interact a painterly quality akin to the landscapes of cascade irregularly down the gallery wall. gracefully within blue expanses suggesting the American nature mystic Albert Pinkham Although the “Happy Birthday and Farewell nocturnal skies. In Mead’s “Survival Earth Ryder. In Fogelson’s “Ulster County Cornwall” could suggest a possible bucolic Dance” two such figures, drawn with Mountainside” dark shadows on a verdant allusion, the real appeal of the installation Matissean simplicity in white oil crayon, slope, evoke an eternal sense of pastoral is its synthesis of sculptural and ethereal make an ecological plea. mystery. elements. Painter/poet Anne Rudder also argues for Myna Harrison-Changar’s digital print Jason LaFerrera makes a statement with the conservation of our natural resources, “Fingerplay 2010” is a vision of perceptual unusual materials in “Virginia Red Fox,” an in her mixed media painting “Denatured sleight of hand, if one may be indulged in animal outline created, in the manner of a Acts,” an adamant protest against water a bad pun. For what appears at first glance mosaic, with fragments of a map. The latter pollution in words and images. Rudder’s to be an embryo in a glass jar –– one of elements suggest the barbaric chase over the raw hybrid works call to mind the prophetic those grotesque specimens in a sleazy old countryside to which these small creatures voice of the late Allen Ginsberg –– especially fashioned country carnival from which one are subjected in a state where they are still in such juxtapositions of the lyrical and the wants to look away!–– morphs mercifully ceremoniously hunted down for sport by a funky, as “Fragrant Green Mountains / on closer viewing into a close-up up of a pack of dogs leading a posse of humans on “Hydrofxxxking to the shale-poisoned deep hand gripping a tumbler of whisky on which horseback. waters.” Harrison-Changar has worked art’s peculiar Madi Lanier continues to successfully One never tires of Marlene Zimmerman’s magic. build on the aesthetic of Cezanne and upbeat post-Pop take on girlish glamour, The acrylic and foamcore reliefs of Carole the Cubists for the postmodern age in as seen in her “NY Hats III,” where a trio Barlowe are literal slices of life that tell watercolors where translucent areas of blue, of pretty fashion victims lights up an urban deadpan stories with a formal austerity akin green, and brown enliven a strong linear corner. Ditto for “The Gothic Bridge” to Alex Katz’s early cutout pieces. In “The armature. In “Woods by the Lake,” as in Continued on pg. 23
10 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Excavating the Allusiveness of Richard Bailey’s Abstractions ong gone is that time when abstract main gestural force is generated with broad, lived to see them, Greenberg might have Lpainting was such an embattled faith thickly encrusted horizontal freehand extolled Bailey’s paintings solely for their that its exponents and advocates had to strokes that create irregular stripes spanning “purity” and “thingness,” while ignoring adamantly deny that the work the entire width of the painting the implications of their horizontal bias. they espoused bore even area. Usually a single color –– a However, Bailey, who says that his paintings the slightest relationship to muted reddish orange, green, or have been influenced by his experience outer reality. Mercifully, the blue hue frosted and variegated as a pilot seems to bear out de Kooning’s postmodern era has ushered with white –– is applied in rough, point in his artist statement: “Depicting in a less doctrinaire attitude juicy layers with gestures that imaginary landscapes with colors, texture, which has brought about a overlap, fluctuate and waver as and movement gives me pause to reflect broadening of possibilities for though responding to the artist’s on youthful exploring. Treading on cross- abstraction. At the same time, nerve impulses. Sometimes bedded sandstone formed from ancient there is still a widespread belief, they shoot upward, forming dunes that were uplifted in tumultuous as formalist guru Clement pointed peaks like gothic spires action, eroded and exposed, the geological Greenberg once put it, that or upside-down stalagmites. formations often studied from altitude “formalized art, the kind that “Rocks in Motion” Although it might be possible while on autopilot ... I apply paint in most people agree to call art, to create such shapes by dripping horizontal patterns, reflecting the formation offers greater satisfactions by and large than paint in rivulets and then reversing their of sedimentary rock; then cause the vertical any other kind of esthetic experience.” direction by turning the canvas upside- lifting, ‘defying gravity’...” The paintings of the Nevada-based down, the thickness of the pigment would artist Richard Bailey, seen a while back at seem to preclude such a strategy, lending Richard Bailey, New Art Center in New York, satisfy on a sense of technical mystery to these New Art Center, 580 8th Avenue both counts. There is no denying that ruggedly executed works. Titles such as www.newartcenter.net the palpable substance of pigment alone “Motion in the Ocean” and “Cracks in the Like that of the late, greatly underrated can offer great delight when it is handled Earth” enhance the engaging allusiveness American painter Jon Schueler who, with the tachiste panache displayed by underlying Bailey’s compositions. in the 1950s, found inspiration for his Bailey, who appears to pile paint onto his In a conversation that I once had abstract expressionist impulse in the cloud compositions with just the right balance with him in his studio in East Hampton, formations above the seacoast of Scotland, between abandon and control. The initial Willem de Kooning remarked, “In a Richard Bailey’s natural subject matter impression that his compositions give is sense, all abstract painting springs from is covert. Yet it informs his every stroke, of being created with molten lava mixed landscape anyway.” One might debate lending heft and depth to his ostensibly with various colors of Play Dough. Their the generality of that opinion, and had he nonobjective aesthetic.–– Maurice Taplinger Ivanrod: Beyond Minimalism orn in Bogota, Columbia, Ivan screws and nuts to the back of the painting BRodriguez Saboya, who is known as support. Whether working with white alone, a painter by the mononym of Ivanrod, as in one of his painted wood assemblages demonstrates auspiciously John Powson’s simply titled “White” (where rectangles and excellent definition of minimalism: “the strips of wood achieve an austere beauty perfection that an artifact achieves when reminiscent of Mondrian sans the color), or it is no longer possible to improve it employing a brilliant red field as the basis by subtraction.” Yet, at the same time, for subtle auras that appear to emanate from “Untitled 20” Ivanrod inscribes some of his ostensibly a central axis in a work entitled “Rojo I,” nonexistent,” Ivanrod’s imagery, while minimalist compositions with mysterious Ivanrod invariably engages the thoughtful subtle, is singularly engaging, seeming linear elements and subtle, shadowy viewer in an almost zen-like visual dialogue. pregnant with elusive meanings. phantom forms, only visible up close, that In the latter work, the sense of limitless In “Untitled 20,” another mostly add what can only be called a metaphysical space is enhanced by the perfectly square monochromatic mixed media work in dimension to his work. Certainly, his work dimensions of the canvas. Just as germane tones of black and gray, a row of elongated goes far beyond the minimalist credo, often to the overall power of the painting, triangles, arranged within rectangular attributed to Frank Stella, that “what you however, is its inner imagery, which divisions, create a sense of exquisite see is all there is.” challenges the semiotician in one with symmetry. But this viewer was drawn to a Trained as an architect, a profession he what appear to be signs and symbols that small white linear shape near the top of the practiced primarily from 1984 to 1996 elude easy interpretation. In the work titled composition. Logo-like in its simplicity, (when his main emphasis switched to his “Black Negro,” for example, a mysterious to him it resembled the collar of a white former avocation, painting), his work half-moon shape within a circle emerges dress shirt, and became in his own mind a shows the discipline that he acquired in from what appears from a distance to be symbol of corporate conformity, perhaps that training and practice. Working in a dark void, much in the manner of the here superimposed somewhat sinisterly over acrylic or mixed media on canvas panels shadowy geometry in the black paintings the esoteric geometry of an ancient culture or layered wood, Ivanrod creates largely of Ad Reinhardt. But while Reinhardt may whose magic was about to be co-opted for geometric compositions endowed with a have made an unreasonable demand on commercial purposes. stately presence. A great many of his works the uninitiated viewer with works that, as That this interpretation is subjective, and are created via the superimposition of one writer put it, “moved toward such a that every viewer would obviously have layers of a single color to which he adds the degree of simplicity that it appears almost a different take on “Untitled 20,” is part aforementioned shadows and lines, while Ivanrod, Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th of what, along with their purely formal subtly altering the two-dimensional bias of attributes, makes the paintings of Ivanrod so the traditional picture plane by applying Street, September 10 – October 1, Reception: Thurs. Sept. 16, 6 – 8 pm fascinating. –– Maurice Taplinger SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 11 Why Robert Gober’s Charles Burchfield Retrospective at the Whitney Matters so Much by Ed McCormack “Americans like in their artists a touch of the hermit “Bonheur was a fascinating character and would also crab, of the ascetic,” wrote John Updike, in his have made for a great exhibition,” Gober told the guests collection of art essays Just Looking. “Homer and at the press preview. Hopper had it, and Eakins and Pollock.” “We’ll schedule it for next year,” the Whitney’s He could easily have added to that list the name of director Adam D. Weinberg, who resembles the young Charles Burchfield, who was born in Ohio, spent most Groucho Marx, quipped from the sidelines. of his adult life in a small town in upstate New York, and * * * once said, “I like to think of myself –– as an artist –– as In the case of Burchfield, at least, Gober has done a being in a nondescript swamp, up to my knees in mire, splendid job of, as he puts it, “investigating another painting the vital beauty I see there, in my own way, not artist’s life and presenting his story.” Along with more caring a damn about tradition, or anyone’s opinion.” than one hundred watercolors, drawings, and the For decades critical opinion has pretty much repaid his handful of oils, he has included selections from the indifference toward it in kind. But now, “Heat Waves in copious journals that the artist kept for most of his life, a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield,” a major retrospective at the Whitney, makes a noble effort to fish this particular hermit crab out of the murky backwaters of 1930s American Scene painting, alternately known by the self-limiting synonym Regionalism, and reposition him as a rare native species of avant gardist. That the exhibition was curated by Robert Gober, a trendy contemporary sculptor given to homoerotic themes, whose best known works are lifelike wax- museum legs sprouting real human hair and protruding from walls, seems just the kind of endorsement that Burchfield needed to convince the hip set that he is something more than a provincial crank. “It’s surprising how many really smart people in the art world don’t know his work at all,” Gober told The New York Times. In the introduction to the exhibition catalog, the curator admits, “But even if I made a mental list of influences, and at times I do, curious to see what Pyramid of Fire (Pyramid of Flame), 1929. I’m thinking, I have never heard the name Charles Watercolor on paper, 241⁄2 x 327⁄8 in. (61 x 81.3 cm). Burchfield come from my brain.” The Charles Rand Penney Collection of Works by This is hardly surprising, given the vast distance Charles E. Burchfield at the Burchfield Penney Art between the approaches, styles, and concerns of the Center, Buffalo State College, 1994. two artists. However, Gober and his partner Don own drawings by Burchfield that caught the eye of Ann as well as his sketches, doodles, and correspondence. Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, in Los He also devotes an entire gallery to the original crayon Angeles, when she came to dinner in their home. and graphite drawings for the private alphabet of signs Philbin, who had organized an earlier Burchfield and symbols that Burchfield called “Conventions for exhibition in 1993 when she was the director of the Abstract Thoughts,” which he devised and included Drawing Center in New York, told Gober that she in his compositions to represent “Fear,” “Insanity,” thought Burchfield was “enormously underappreciated “Morbidness,” “Fascination of Evil,” “The Fear of and insufficiently known, especially by younger artists Loneliness,” “Mute Sorrow,” “Aimless Brooding,” and who have been influenced by his work and barely know any number of other very subtle and specific emotional it.” states. “I sat with this over the weekend,” Gober recalls, “and Although not immediately decipherable to the on Monday I took a chance and pitched the idea of a uninitiated viewer, these pictographic shapes –– some show to Annie. A show that she had basically framed.” alluding to feelings harking back to his father’s early At the Whitney’s press preview for the exhibition, death, which left the family destitute, and other which had traveled from the Hammer Museum where it childhood traumas –– add further to the work once one originated, Gober, a tall, bearded man with a wry sense is made aware of them. They are especially evocative of humor, confessed that had a different curator visited in the haunting, darkly monochromatic composition he could just as easily have proposed an exhibition of “Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night, 1917,” works by Rosa Bonheur, a nineteenth-century French of which Burchfield wrote, poetically (if not quite as animalier, one of whose drawings he had recently coherently as one might wish): “It was an attempt purchased. Bonheur, who was spectacularly successful to express a childhood emotion –– a rainy winter for her animal subjects in her time, lived in a castle and night––the church bell ringing . . . the roofs of the –– shades of Michael Jackson! –– owned her own private houses dripping with rain . . . the child attempts to zoo. A lesbian, she always wore male attire, having be comforted by the thoughts of candle lights and obtained permission from the prefect of police, at a Christmas trees, but the fear of the black, rainy night is time when cross-dressing was still illegal in France, by overpowering.” claiming that “wearing the clothing of my own sex is a In an excellent catalogue essay for the present constant bother” and interfered with her work. exhibition, Nancy Weekly, head of collections at the 12 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York, analyzes the same picture, noting how the artist “used his newly developed symbolic pictographs to illustrate not only his childhood fears but also his adult distaste for religious zealotry, provoked by a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher, his evangelical grandfather, and the example of his late, unreligious father.” Calling attention with capital letters and italics to the artist’s own terms from the “Conventions” within her text, she points out, “The steeple is a monstrous bird with vacant eyes of Imbecility and raised eyebrows of Aimless Abstraction (Hypnotic Intensity). The bell tower’s puffed-out white breast swirls with black and blue Fear-provoking peals, a shadow of Morbidness (Evil) inside its belfry. Fear floats at the pinnacle instead of a cross. Black rain bleeds thickly from the clouds, which are gigantic hooking swirls of Fear radiating terrifying sound waves. ” The Song of the Katydids on an August Morning, 1917. Watercolor, gouache, Numerous other writers over the graphite, colored chalks, and pastel on off-white wove paper, 18 x 21 3/4 in. years have noted the mask-like quality (45.1 x 55.2 cm). Karen and Kevin Kennedy Collection. of Burchfield’s ramshackle Victorian facades and the manner in which he a sensibility so different from his own Gober’s inclusion of some pencil sketches anthropomorphizes trees and other permeates the show, which he approaches of the trucks and loading docks at the elements of nature as well. It seems likely with a fellow artist’s sense of curiosity and wallpaper factory that Burchfield made enough that these elements of his work wonderment rather than the all knowing from his office window on his lunch hour. could have inspired the animators of Walt attitude of an art historian. Nor does he Poignantly reminiscent of grim views Disney’s more ambitious feature films hesitate to take a creative license that no we’ve all seen of fences and guard towers such as “Fantasia,” as well as some of professional curator would dare. by inmates of prison camps, these wistful the schlockier manifestations of 1960s One of his more intrepid touches was sketches turn the installation into an psychedelia. (In citing its “hallucinatory to cover an entire gallery at the Whitney eloquently layered piece of storytelling. quality” in a brief talk about Burchfield’s (as he had done at the Hammer Museum) * * * with wallpaper that Burchfield designed for The success that Burchfield achieved Charles Burchfield, M.H. Birge & Sons, a company in Buffalo, remarkably soon after Bertha, worried Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where he worked from 1921 that what he called “hack work” might 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, to 1929 to support his wife, Bertha, and be taking a toll on her husband’s health, through October 17, 2010 their five children, and use it as a backdrop convinced him to concentrate on painting, for some of the American Scene paintings became another kind of prison. In 1930, work, before introducing Gober at the with which the artist first achieved popular a year after he resigned from his job at press preview, Whitney director Adam D. success in the 1930s. the wallpaper factory and his American Weinberg even let word “psychedelic” Especially resonant in this context is Scene paintings had started selling briskly escape his lips, before hastening to add, “Pyramid of Fire (Pyramid of Flame),” a at the Frank Rehn Gallery in Manhattan, “although in his case, I’m sure no drugs 1929 watercolor of fire fighters spraying Burchfield had the singular distinction of were involved!”) their hoses into a burning house, becoming the first contemporary American Sad to say, another blow against which achieves a surreal dissonance, set artist to be honored with a solo exhibition Burchfield’s proper placement in the against the cozy domestic design of the at the Museum of Modern Art, which modernist canon may be that such widely sunflower wallpaper. Here, Gober actually was then one year old and had previously popularized commercial appropriations of his elevates one of Burchfield’s more banal shown only established European masters, expressive iconography have influenced some and illustrative pictures with a touch of such as Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. tastemakers to dismiss their original creator as contemporary irony. However, he also Yet the name Charles Burchfield does a master of nothing more than kitsch. risks upstaging and even trivializing not appear –– even in the index–– of * * * the earlier artist’s work by hanging an Abraham A. Davidson’s definitive history, Having never much cared for Robert original watercolor rendering for the same “Early American Modernist Painting 1910- Gober’s sculptures of disembodied limbs wallpaper pattern on top of the actual 19.” Why? Well, the title of the MoMA and oddly configured porcelain sinks product –– a juxtaposition that could seem show says it all: “Charles Burchfield: that appear as if designed for grotesque cruelly close to home, since sunflowers Early Watercolors, 1916 to 1918.” The medical procedures, I did not expect to are also a frequent motif of Burchfield’s retrospective slant of the show can only find him so personally likable, nor his take paintings. Indeed, the entire installation have seemed a backhanded slap at the on Burchfield’s work so generous. Indeed, could have come off as fecklessly gaudy as artist’s recent watercolors by the museum’s Gober’s good nature and sympathy for Warhol’s cow-head wallpaper, if not for founding director Alfred H. Barr. Tellingly, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 13 Burchfield sent Barr a thank you note faithfully pasted newspaper and magazine for sending him the catalogue but didn’t clippings into voluminous scrapbooks, he venture the short trip downstate from gave interviews to Time and Life, executed Buffalo to attend the opening reception or industrial illustrations on commission for see the show. Perhaps it would have been Fortune, and dutifully inserted a stiffly too disheartening to compare the relatively detailed rendering of a whisky bottle and muddy, finicky realism of his newer two glasses on a terrace table into the Regionalist landscapes to what he lauded in foreground of an anemic pastoral panorama one of his journal entries as “The courage in an ad for Johnny Walker Black Label. Sun and Rocks, 1918–50. Watercolor and to see nature with the great graphic * * * gouache on paper, 40 x 56 in. (101.6 x shorthand of youth.” Although many of Burchfield’s 142.2 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, * * * unconditional champions would doubtless Buffalo, New York. Room of Over half the works from the show disagree, to me most of Burchfield’s Contemporary Art Fund, 1953. at MoMA (with comparable ones from American Scene paintings were barely the same period substituted for those distinguishable from the illustrations he that could not be located or borrowed) did for Fortune magazine of the railroads are included at the Whitney in a gallery in Pennsylvania, the sulfur mines in Texas, labeled “A Golden Year?” The phrase and the coal mines in Virginia. At their was Burchfield’s own nostalgic tribute worst, as in “End of Day,” his 1938 picture to 1917, his most prolific year, and the of a line of workers traversing a slushy hill question-mark is unnecessary: That was on a street of shabby row-houses, they the year he painted “The Song of Katydids have the grimy atmosphere of WPA post on an August Morning” and “The Insect office murals. At their best, as in “Winter Chorus,” two works in which he not Twilight,” 1930, one of his few attempts Two Ravines, 1934–43. Watercolor on only created innovative semi abstract at oil painting, and “The Builders,” 1931, paper, 361⁄2 x 611⁄8 in. (92.7 x 155.3 cm). compositions from the confluence of they look like second-rate Edward Hopper. Hunter Museum of American Art, botanical and architectural forms found By the time he had perpetrated the worst Chattanooga, Tennessee. Gift of the in the suburbs, but devised visual signals of them, “End of Day,” and the abysmally Benwood Foundation. for the sounds made by grasshoppers and dreary “Old House by the Creek,” from crickets. These and another experiment the same year, he was already complaining in synesthesia, “The Night Wind,” with that he had “abandoned creativeness,” yet its ghostly vowel-shaped forms, predate calling it “libel” when critics referred to Arthur Dove’s famous “Fog Horns” by his work as American Scene or Regionalist more than a decade. Indeed, Burchfield’s painting. But soon, with the country in the best work has always seemed closer in middle of the war and the art market at a spirit to the freewheeling nature mysticism standstill, even those despised terms had of Dove than to the more conservative lost their dubious value. storytelling of Edward Hopper, with “Since no pictures of any kind are being whom he formed a mutual admiration bought, I might as well paint entirely for society possibly, prompted by their myself,” Burchfield wrote in his journal in both feeling miscast as American Scene 1943. “This is what an artist ought to do painters. Surely such early watercolors under any circumstances, but it is not as by Burchfield as “The East Wind” and easy as it sounds.” “Rainy Night,” with their small dwellings Determined now to regain the bold melting polymorphously into the elements, vitality and “courage” of his youth, it was veer more toward the abstract than the to his early watercolors that he turned for The Insect Chorus, 1917. Opaque and picturesque. inspiration. For an artist of such deeply transparent watercolor with ink, graphite, * * * intuitive gifts, the solution at which he and crayon on off-white paper, 20 x 157⁄8 in. The journalist Jimmy Breslin once finally arrived was curiously systematic: (50.8 x 38.1 cm). Munson-Williams-Proctor wittily explained the decline of the Irish pasting additional sheets of paper onto the Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New literary tradition by claiming that, “like large number of pictures left over from the York. Edward W. Root Bequest, 1957. most writers today, they have a block orgy of inspired prolificness that was his caused by a loaf of bread stuck in the “golden year” (and perhaps the year or two brain.” In another way, a similar condition immediately preceding and following it) to apparently afflicted Burchfield. No doubt extend their compositions and create new grateful to be supporting his large family works on grander scale with a decidedly through the sale of his paintings, while visionary quality. contemporaries with more bohemian I had hoped to resist using the “v” word lifestyles –– most notably Arthur Dove, here, tainted as it has become in recent Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Georgia years by its association with so-called O’Keeffe –– were staying the modernist “outsider” art and all the unschooled course and storing up historical prestige, compulsiveness (and even madness) for End of the Day, 1938. Watercolor on Burchfield sailed through the Depression which the French designation “art brut,” paper, 381⁄4 x 581⁄4 in. (97.1 x 148 cm). The era as one of the country’s most popular whose meaning carries so easily into Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, American Scene painters. As Bertha English, once so serviceably sufficed. But Philadelphia. Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1940. 14 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 for Burchfield, as for William Blake (only on hold to follow literally the frugal, bitter mercifully, in the former’s case, devoid of Yankee wisdom of Frost’s poem “Provide, the flightier qualities that always tempted Provide” –– Burchfield could occasionally Nabokov to drop the “s” in cosmic), be overreaching. “The Four Seasons,” no other word will really do. Spiritual is dated 1951-59, is a tricky, patly stylized another word one would have preferred pastiche so Disneyfied and psychedelically to steer clear of in relation to Burchfield, vulgarized as to suggest that the artist has since it has been similarly degraded by its descended to emulating his own imitators. many mindlessly promiscuous New Age Yet all is redeemed in the airy glory of applications. “Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon,” Yet to avoid that word –– or at least completed just a year before the artist’s its original meaning –– would be to death. Although begun in 1961 and leave unstated that the large composite completed in 1965, this great watercolor, watercolors in which Burchfield persevered, with its shadowy windblown trees and pair despite a variety of late-life illnesses, right of angelic-looking dragonflies suspended Dawn of Spring, ca. 1960s. Watercolor, up his death in 1967, gloriously illuminate in beams streaming from a silvery moon charcoal, and white chalk on joined paper divine qualities in nature much in the above the clustered white puffs, is mounted on board, 52 x 591⁄2 in. (132.1 x manner of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For possessed of an incomparably ethereal 135.3 cm). DC Moore Gallery, New York. in these final works the artist appears to freshness, suggesting the career-crowning concur with Emerson’s claim that “the achievement of an artist who has learned universe is composed of Nature and the to call upon the hard-won technical finesse Soul,” and he evolves a rhapsodic visual of a lifetime to render a fleeting moment language to convey the cycles of creation immutable. to which the great Transcendentalist poet, “Looking at this painting,” Robert essayist, and philosopher alludes in the Gober said that morning, as he led us up to lines, “A subtle chain of subtle countless “Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon” in rings / The next unto the farthest brings; the final gallery of the show at the Whitney, / The eye reads omens where it goes, / “I always imagine this 70 year old guy lying And speaks all languages the rose; / And, down in the dark in his garden at night, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts looking up at the moon through dandelion through all the spires of form.” seed heads. And it makes me think that If one were to make a conceit of the would be a pretty good way to go!” artist’s own mineral metaphor, the last Not to break the spell, but because I two and a half decades of his life –– during was curious to know what he thought, which he painted (or perhaps it would I collared Gober, as soon as I could get be more accurate to say completed) the through the crowd around him when the mature works that most of us who have press preview broke up, and led him over long admired him would probably agree to another large painting called “Night are his masterpieces –– might be called his of the Equinox.” Pointing out the odd, Platinum Period. For it was in 1946 that flame-like shapes sticking up like the Burchfield gave us “The Sphinx and the proverbial sore thumbs from some of the Milky Way,” arguably the most hauntingly rain-drenched shacks, I asked him if he Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950. beautiful nocturnal scene since van Gogh’s agreed with me that this was one of the few Watercolor on paper, 401⁄8 x 293⁄4 in. “The Starry Night.” Yet Burchfield’s scenes works in the exhibition where Burchfield (101.6 x 73.7 cm). Parrish Art Museum, set in daylight are equally transcendent: In failed to integrate the “Conventions” into Southampton, New York. Gift of Mr. and the 1950 composition “Glory of Spring the composition harmoniously. Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark, 1959. (Radiant Spring),” the spiky stumps of “You’re right,” said the curator of the dead trees in a charred forest are resurrect exhibition, chuckling. “I have no idea what by sunlight, which halos them like yellow they are!” flames engulfing the gothic spires of Then Gober walked me over to another Blake’s “black’ning church.” In “Autumnal work called “Gateway to September,”and Fantasy” 1916-1944” (of which the artist pointed out the “the angular geometric wrote in a letter to his art dealer, “I had shapes within the big insect tree” that he been struggling in a new painting to found just as jarringly incongruous, amid visualize the cry of a nuthatch and have the the more logically organic forms in the cry resound thru the autumnal woods”), bucolic scene. the gray trees form arched echo chambers, “But he was reaching,” he said resembling the stone portals of a cathedral, forgivingly, “He was taking chances in through which the boomerang-shaped order to go beyond what he had done notes of birdsong reverberate like early before. So you have to give him credit for An April Mood, 1946–55. Watercolor and evening madrigals. that. After all, he achieved one of the rarest charcoal on joined paper, 40 x 54 in. Like any late starter –– which he truly things for any artist: great art in old age.” (101.6 x 137.2 cm). Whitney Museum of was after the long muddy miasma of his And now it was my turn to agree with American Art. Purchase, with partial middle period, when he would seem to him. funds from Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. have put his highest aesthetic ambitions ––– Ed McCormack Fleischman. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 15 Nam Chun Cho and Kwija Lee Cho: A Harmonious Marriage of Lyrical Visions lthough Nam Chun Cho Nam Chun Cho does, Aexplores the new possibilities however, present us of the digital photographic print, with a more serene and his wife, Kwija Lee Cho, works scene to contemplate in in the time-honored medium of his image of a mother oils on canvas, and both have their goose supervising her own unique approaches to subject long row of goslings, a matter, what they do share in single straggler waddling common is an upbeat vision and an awkwardly off the shore ability to endow simple everyday to join the others as they things with nobility. Seen in a two float in gracefully curving person exhibition, their works both formation. Sunlight contrast with and complement dapples the leaves on an each other. The viewer moving overhanging tree-limb between them feels the magnetic on the left side of the pull of opposite poles balanced in composition and halos perfect harmony, a rarity even with the water swirling about artists who have shared a good the avian family with deal of their lives with each other. shimmering Impressionist Yet there are enough significant strokes. differences between the two artists Nam Chun Cho Another dazzling to provide variety, given that each digital print by Nam has a distinctive style. If anything, Chun Cho focuses on the viewer experiences a sense of a single white swan excitement at the sheer variety of floating amid swirling imagery that their artistic dialogue rainbow reflections of generates. colorful foliage, dripping Kwija Lee Cho appears to be a down from the curving natural born painter with a direct, arch of a small stone clear style that makes her floral footbridge in a public studies, particularly, strike the park. And yet another viewer as pure bursts of unabashed arching form dominates joy at the miracle of nature and the same artist’s print all creation. Her oil on canvas, of the Chicago skyline “Sunflower,” is an exemplary reflected on the surface case in point. Here, two brilliant of a large geodesic dome, yellow flowers set boldly against creating the trompe-l’oeil a vibrant blue background, are effect that the bending decoratively attended by five buildings and the monarch butterflies. Their large, distorted clouds above curvaceous green leaves and stems are contained within are outlined in yellow, as though one of those clear plastic touched by sunlight. The black “snow globes.” The borders around the burnished pièce de resistance of this orange wings of the butterflies are composition is a small delineated as definitely as the dark Kwija Lee Cho silhouette of a single bird leading between areas of stained glass, which delicate yet vibrant hues with a characteristic perched on the curving top of the dome and in fact the beautiful insects suggest, given combination of subtlety and boldness. Two set against a contrasting cloudless expanse of the luminous quality with which the painter schools of silvery white and gold creatures pale blue sky. imparts to them. And although she works flutter their flared fins gracefully against Water fowl, along with a lone pigeon are in a Western medium, there is something the translucent green water. And in a spare seen in Central Park in another digital print quintessentially Asian about how Kwija desert landscape, she creates swirling near- by Nam Chun Cho. Only now it is winter Lee Cho imparts poetic resonance to the abstract rhythms with the forms of sand with snow on the ground, trees are bare dunes and overhanging clouds. and there is ice in the water. But the overall Nam Chun Cho & Kwija Lee Cho, By contrast, Kwija Lee Cho’s oil of a tiger grayness is brightened by Christo’s orange The International Center in New York, Inc. on the prowl, painted in honor of the Year flags on the opposite side of the pond. 50 West 23rd Street, 7th floor of the Tiger on the lunar calendar, is at once In their first two-artist exhibition, Nam Exhibition: October 4 – 29, fierce and cuddly-looking, like the lion in the Chun Cho and Kwija Lee Cho, both of Reception: Thursday, October 7, 6-8 pm French naive artist Henri Rousseau’s “The whom have exhibited separately here and humblest of subjects. Sleeping Gypsy.” abroad and participated in group shows by For example, in another oil on canvas Nam Chun Cho, also celebrates the Korean American Contemporary Arts, Ltd., called “Freedom” she depicts the several current calendar year with his digital print display a kindred lyricism that makes for an of the ornamental Japanese species of of a tiger. But even in repose in tall grass, especially enjoyable viewing experience. fish swimming in a pond in a palette of his beast appears anything but cuddly. –– Maureen Flynn
16 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Vincent Arcilesi’s New Roman Idyll he last time Vincent Arcilesi found imaginary menage. figurative painting today. Tinspiration in Italy, in 1994, he gave Although earlier in his career Arcilesi Consider “ Diana and Venus in the us an exhibition that could easily have created a stir with paintings of couples Villa Medici Gardens,”where, in contrast been called “Love, Italian Style,” given engaged in explicit sex acts, one believes to the informal stance of the Venus in its emphasis on couples canoodling amid him when he insists that he never aims the previous painting, as Diana stands on Roman landmarks and in the bucolic to be controversial. Never gratuitously her left in the magnificent garden with countryside of Sicily. prurient, his paintings celebrate the beauty its precisely trimmed hedges receding “Summer Night in Rome,” the 96"x80" and sensuality not only of the human body, in vanishing perspective, displaying the the centerpiece of that memorable show but of all creation. His figures –– more strong back and firm buttocks of the (which was actually titled “Arcilesi in often nude than clothed, mostly but not disciplined huntress, Venus actually assumes Italy”) serves as a segueway into the a Botticelli-like pose with her right present exhibition, “Arcilesi in Rome,” hand above her left breast and her left in which one of our most original hand resting on the thigh below it. Yet, figurative painters focuses more locally here again, Arcilesi gives her a more on that fabled city. down to earth sensuality than we see in Such has been the global scope of Botticelli’s celestial nymphet. And if this the artist’s themes over the past several doe-eyed, high cheekboned brunette’s seasons that many of us have come to charms are less dewy than those of the regard his “Arcilesi in...” exhibitions earlier painter’s fairer figure, she has her as the artistic answer to Fodor’s Travel own more seasoned and voluptuous Guides. However, every locale that allure, reminiscent of Bert Stern’s great Arcilesi paints is radically transformed last photos of Marilyn Monroe (in by the poetic liberties that he takes, which the photographer peeled away particularly in regard to relocating all the layers of Hollywood illusion architectural monuments to suit his and airbrushed artifice to immortalize compositions and abolishing civic codes the screen goddess’s naked womanly against public nudity to achieve his warmth). Nor does the brash conceit Edenic vision. of the priapic spire, rising from the Rome provides an especially fountain between the low hedgerows auspicious subject for the Italian- behind the two figures, put too fine American artist, in terms of both his a point on a beauty that even the ethnic and artistic heritage. Indeed, sturdy virgin huntress Diana turns her in “San Lorenzo in Lucina,” a view of handsome aquiline profile to admire. the church where Poussin is interred Among several other pleasures to (one of eight small plein air landscapes be savored in “Arcilesi in Rome” is that complement the seven large the large canvas “Venus and Apollo at figure paintings in the present show), Hadrian’s Villa,” in which the enigmatic the tiny figures of tourists, framed “Diana and Venus in the Villa Medici Gardens” Roman Emperor’s mania for collecting by architectural geometry, recall the exotic treasures is reflected not only formal components of the high Renaissance exclusively, female –– inhabit an arcadian in the Grecian statues and over-the-top master’s processions. realm of blue skies and heavenly clouds Byzantine decor, but also in the dusky male It is in the large figure paintings, floating above palatial public squares, and female nudes posturing at poolside. however, that Arcilesi takes his most verdant gardens, or landscapes dotted with Then there is “The Dreamer,” a tender and startling imaginative leaps and also displays picturesque ruins, into which conflict rarely unguarded portrait, executed with a breezy most spectacularly his exquisite technical intrudes. vigor more akin to the artist’s plein air proficiency. Witness the atmospheric One of the most magnificent recent landscapes than his larger oils, of a tanned, amalgam of artificial light and moonlight examples is the large canvas “Venus at tawny-haired nude dozing in a beige chair flooding in through the open dome of the Roman Forum,” where many of the before a window looking out on a partial the Pantheon in “La Fornarina and Venus above elements (among them the statue view of the Trevi Fountain, its stridently at Raphael’s Tomb,” which depicts a of Caster and his horse imported from the animated equine and human figures and nocturnal meeting in the stately mausoleum Campidoglio on an aesthetic whim) sprawl gushing waters contrasting with her soft between Margherita Luti, the sexy baker out panoramically behind a standing female repose. girl who posed for one of Raphael’s figure, confronting us not with classical But perhaps the biggest surprise, for greatest portraits and became his Roman coyness, but with the frank confidence of those who think they can predict what mistress, and the Goddess of Love herself. a hip young woman completely at ease Vincent Arcilesi will do next, will be “The That Raphael’s fiancee Marie Bibbiena is in her full frontal nudity, her arms raised, Secret,” a large canvas of two pretty, fully also interred in the place where these two her hands clasped behind her head. One is clothed young women exchanging a sisterly comely nudes preen like concubines in a especially impressed not only by Arcilesi’s buss in a Roman piazza dotted with distant Turkish harem lends an element of scandal ability to carry off such an intricately tourists, its mood as exhilaratingly fresh and comparable, in modern times, to when detailed composition without sacrificing lyrically unforgettable as the evocative title French president Mitterand’s wife and painterly fluidity, but also by how he of Irwin Shaw’s famous short story, “The mistress were seen seated together beside imbues a mythic subject with contemporary Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” his coffin. Add Arcilesi’s faithful copy of immediacy by depicting the specific features –– Ed McCormack Lorenzetto’s sculpture of the Madonna, of the model, rather than succumbing to gracing the tomb in the background, and too-easy neoclassical idealization. Arcilesi’s Vincent Arcilesi, Broome Street Gallery, 498 our most intrepid contemporary figure eschewal of all such clichés lends his work Broome Street, October 19–November 7 painter outdoes himself in this masterly an edgy sensuality absent from much Reception: October 19, 5–8pm SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 17 An International Selection at Gelabert Studios ummer group exhibitions require no which flared out from the wall, as if with a painterly histrionics) hinted at mysterious Soverriding theme or better purpose than life of its own. and elusive meanings. Clearly derived to offer deserving talents a casual showcase Another gifted sculptor, Roberto Recio from actual things transformed beyond over the art season’s slowest months. combined visual wit with impressive recognition, Laberge’s compositions One of the more notable recent ones, formal simplicity in two actual-size vases of combine visual and conceptual elements in the gallery’s first in fact, took place at the flowers, fashioned entirely in aluminum and a seamless synthesis. New Orleans sculptor Upper West Side’s elegant Gelabert Studios. presented on pedestals. Each bud and stem Theresa Rogers made an auspicious New Among the featured artists was Dawn is streamlined and stylized, yet rendered in York exhibition debut in this show with Arena, who has had two previous impressive detail, Recio’s bouquets have an a bizarre wall relief gargoyle-like ceramic exhibitions in the space and is known odd robotic charm. mask with a brass spider on its forehead, for making diverse aesthetic statements Collage, the major innovation that sticking out its golden tongue, as well as in a wide variety of unusual materials. gave 20th century modernist art its basic a vigorously expressionistic cast bronze Here, Arena showed two mixed media vocabulary is employed in the miniaturist figure called “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa.” assemblages created with wasp nests, black tradition of Kurt Schwitters with exemplary And an untitled canvas by Belgian-born West African Clay, leather, and bullet elegance by Gitou Knoop, a distinguished Persian painter Farzin Nikzad displayed a proof(!) lexan. Both “Wasp I” and “Wasp artist from the Netherlands. Also known calligraphic style akin to Mark Tobey and II” incorporated mysterious masklike as a prolific painter and sculptor, in these Brice Mardin, but with his own distinctively faces. Partially covered with the straw-like works, apparently created with tiny muscular linear ecriture, which made one wasp-nest materials, they seemed to pun fragments and slivers of glossy magazine eager to see more of his work. visually on the acronym for “white anglo pages, Knoop melds colors in a manner Also including two small, rugged, saxon protestant,” African tribal artifacts, resembling graceful “marbleized” strokes of abstract steel pieces by the late, great grass huts, and a variety of other intriguing coloristically variegated enamel laid down French sculptor Albert Feraud that would associations. Another fanciful wall piece against pristine areas of white paper. Not add a note of distinction to any group was a large steel, copper, silver, and brass for all tastes, but possessed of a grace that exhibition, this gorgeous show made one “cutout” sculpture by Glenn Murgacz, also will thrill certain aesthetic sensibilities, these eager to see future group ventures in this known for creating monumental all-weather modest works provide a veritable visual always surprising uptown venue. outdoor pieces, such as one of sports figures definition of the term “exquisiteness.” –– Maurice Taplinger created for the facade of the Woodbridge Canadian artist Janick Laberge showed Community Center. abstract mixed media works on hanging In Murgacz’s witty celebration of scrolls in which forms with craggily serrated Gelabert Studio romantic terpsichore, the only 3-D element edges akin to those of Clyfford Still (yet 255 West 86th Street was the female dancer’s copper mesh tutu, more graphically conceived, sans the www.gelabertstudiosgallery.com Tamar Rosen: Heir to a Noble Painterly Tradition here are certain painters whose work air tradition. that her brilliant colors and Tappears to be as much about honoring It is in her vigorous brushwork provide. the tradition of painting itself as about landscapes in In “Orchid,” for example, the the subjects that their paintings depict. particular that central placement of the large Upon such artist we sometimes bestow the Rosen most flower lends the composition an honorific of “painter’s painter,” and that resembles emblematic power comparable designation seems entirely appropriate for Corot, who to certain paintings by Georgia Tamar Rosen, an artist from Tel Aviv, widely anticipated the O’Keeffe. Yet at the same time, exhibited in both Israel and the U.S., whose Impressionists Rosen adds a dimension of solo show will be featured at Agora Gallery but also imbued delicacy to the painting by virtue in Chelsea this October. his canvases of the exquisitely harmonized If pressed to classify Rosen’s style in with a sense of pale pink, purple, and blue hues relation to artists of the past, one would the intangible. “Orchid” that she employs to add depth have to say that in terms of texture and For like that and dimension to the flesh of intensity her oils on canvas are akin to French master, the atmosphere in Rosen’s the petals within the broader design. By Soutine, yet in temperament she appears landscapes does not emanate, as in the contrast, strident orange bulbs and slashing closer to Corot. Her resemblance to the case of the Impressionists from outward green strokes bring an almost expressionist former artist is perhaps most evident in her sources of light alone. Rather, it emanates immediacy to “Tulips 2,” where the flowers still life on canvas “Fish 2,” where a half from within as well, and her deep affection appear as though suspended in midair dozen fish lined up on a cutting board are for the places that she depicts in landscapes against a vibrant blue field. depicted in rugged strokes of thick impasto such as “Sabra- Cactus 4,” and “Yarkon Here, as in the other oils on canvas in that would have done Soutine proud. View 3” lends these scenes a romantic mood this exhibition, we see Tamar Rosen’s deep The silvery blue skins of the fish and the far beyond the Impressionists’ scientific sensitivity to nature and its nuances of tone reddish wood textures of the cutting transcription of light and shadow. Indeed, and atmosphere. Even more impressive, board, especially, recall facets of the great each brushstroke is invested with emotional however, is the artist’s gift for bringing her Lithuanian Jewish French expatriate’s work. intensity, as well as a shimmering coloristic subjects alive and making them immutable However, this particular nature morte is as intensity that we see to particular advantage in the palpable substance of pigment. close as Rosen comes to the violence that in oils such as “Yarkon View (River),” where –– Marie R. Pagano we see in Soutine’s flayed beef carcasses; for verdant greens merge with yellows and blues she generally seems to prefer celebrating to create a vision verging on abstraction. Tamar Rosen, Agora Gallery, 530 West in her still lifes the fresh brilliance of floral Rosen’s floral paintings also warrant 25th Street, October 5-26. Reception: bouquets or the living landscape in the plein further study for the sheer pleasure Thursday, October 7, 6-8 PM. 18 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Max’s Kansas City Revisited: Among the Disappeared by Ed McCormack me breakfast one morning, something wit Fran Lebowitz before she wearied of he and her husband were rock and roll more intimate and domestic, to my way proposing to me that we write about each Sroyalty. He was a big time booking of thinking, than simply sleeping with other and make each other famous and agent for some of the most expensive acts in someone. That made me feel too tawdry made herself famous with her best-seller, the business, and his mantra was “An ass in and unfaithful to the estranged wife I “Metropolitan Life”; Alice Cooper, who, every seat, an ass in every seat.” They used still loved and hoped to win back to ever even after I wrote unflatteringly about him, to pull up outside Max’s in a vintage Rolls crash at this woman’s place again. Being a asked Jann Wenner if I could also cover his Royce. The chauffeur would get out and gentleman, I wouldn’t be telling you any next tour for Rolling Stone, since, “Fast open the back door and they’d stumble out of this if her picture too wasn’t captioned Eddie is the only guy who will drink with dressed for hippie Halloween, looking as “unidentified.” me in the morning”; another old drinking if they’d fall on their faces on the sidewalk This book (whose “very existence and companion, Lou Reed, who ruined his before they made it to the front door. It essential spirit,” its author Steven Kasher image by dragging me to his Park Avenue was ostentatious even for the early seventies, acknowledges in the credits, was inspired by speed doctor and footing the bill for an when you might run into Lou, Iggy, and “the great gritty photography” of my old X-ray when I was convinced I had destroyed Bowie hoofing it down dark Park my liver but determined not to do Avenue South together. She looked anything about it; and poet and like something by Walter Keane who Warhol assistant Gerard Malanga, to painted those kitschy waifs with big whom I finally apologized years later, liquid eyes. Only hers were all pupil after sobering up, for repeatedly and often rolling up her head until calling him “Jerome Lasagna” in almost all you saw was white. print (“That’s all right,” said mellow Those drowsy junkie eyes are what Gerard, “You were, like, the original I remember most about the night punk”). she and her husband showed up in There’s an informative essay in the my room at the Sheraton-Cadillac book by Steve Watson about how in Detroit to share some coke they Mickey originally conceived of Max’s had when we were all traveling with as an old-fashioned artist’s saloon the circus, me for Rolling Stone, on and amassed a great collection of one of the tours he had booked. My paintings and sculptures by letting wife Jeannie had recently left me, not Girl standing in front of Max’s by Anton Perich artists run up tabs. Then Andy without good reason, and I was up Courtesy Anton Perich and Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC arrived with his Factory menagerie for almost anything. But not what of androgynous glitter-tots and he suggested, after we had done the coke friend and sometime collaborator Anton screaming apparitions and everything went in the cozy light of one of those little hotel Perich) is full of fantastic pictures of the gaga. Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye table lamps, and he got up to leave alone. disappeared and the dead. Among the latter writes about what it was like “making music “She wants to stay man,” he said. “It’s are: Andy, of course; Max’s owner Mickey at Max’s” after Mickey had to sell to new okay, we’re both cool with it.”. Ruskin; drag queens Candy Darling and owners who replaced the art with video I looked over at her lolling like a Jackie Curtis; actress Cyrinda Foxe; rock games. And Lou Reed contributes a brief smacked-out rag doll on the bed, the encylopediast Lillian Roxon; musicians Afterword, thanking Mickey’s memory buttons of her embroidered jeans already Arthur Kane, Johnny Thunders, Stiv on behalf of those of us who probably undone, a sickly little smile on her face, and Baters, Sid Vicious, Joey Ramone, Dee Dee contributed to his bankruptcy by being thought of those lines from Lou Reed’s Ramone, Johnny Ramone, Gram Parsons, allowed to run up huge tabs. (Lou says he ‘Street Hassle”: it could be a hassle trying Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, Odetta; Factory finally settled his, but some of us didn’t get to explain myself to a / police officer personalities Fred Hughes, Eric Emerson, around to it before Mickey OD’d.) about how it was your old lady got herself Dorothy Dean, Andrea Feldman Warhol To me, in its heyday Max’s was like the stiffed...” Whipps, and Tinkerbelle; artists Willem snottiest, most exclusive “Gossip Girl” And I said, “But I’m not cool with it, de Kooning, Robert Mapplethorpe, John private high school in the world –– only, man. I’d rather you took her with you.” Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, and on and for grownup misfits who never belonged to I read an article a few years ago all about on... any in-group or anything else as teenagers. how the husband eventually lost everything The living are also well represented in You might say that hanging out there and ended up homeless but was now off telling candid shots by Anton and a few exacerbated everything that was already heroin and back in business. (Many of us others: distinguished poet and art critic wrong with me when I was on my own know the drill.) I don’t recall it mentioning René Richard publicly blowing one of like a rolling stone and in the prime of my anything about the wife, and I didn’t really those strange cultists who used to show decline. But it could sometimes be a great think much about her again until a typically up at Max’s mostly naked with clothespins comfort in a way that I think Leonard spaced out picture of her from the old days clamped onto their nipples, while an Cohen meant when he wrote the lines in turned up in a new book from Abrams unidentified man at the table looks on, one of his poems that go, “It’s good to sit called “Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, appalled; tastemaker Danny Fields, my with people / who are up so late / your Rock and Roll,” with a caption that said, early tour guide to the New York Satyricon, other homes wash away / and other meals “Unidentified.” who could make even his favorite word you left / unfinished on the plate...” The ex-wife of a prominent musician “fabulous,” sound like a divinely bored The book will be launched in conjunction with also turned up in the book. She had a yawn, jamming his fingers in his ears while the art exhibition “Max’s Kansas City” at comfortable little apartment in the Village, sitting with a scenemaker who called Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, and when I was essentially homeless, if himself Pristine Conditioner; model and September 15-October 9. And Ed McCormack not literally out on the street, I sometimes supergroupie Bebe Buell, who gave the is still working on his memoir, “Hoodlum stayed with her. Then, instead of bringing world Liv Tyler, making as if she’s about to Heart: Confessions of a Test Dummy for the me a beer for my hangover, she cooked rip her already revealing shirt off; writer- Crash and Burn Generation.” SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 19 Neo-Conceptualist von Schmidt Puts His Brand on an Era
n the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Mailer. Thus “Thurifer,” one of the digital Without ruining the surprise for the Iblogs, when motivational speakers tell prints in “Branded,” von Schmidt’s new viewer, suffice it to say that “Osteomancer,” us things like “in order to be the CEO solo exhibition at Noho Gallery, shows an elegantly crafted art deco cabinet of Me, Inc., you have to brand yourself, the naked lower body of a man holding a modeled on those imposing x-ray machines put yourself on a shelf and become a smoking branding iron, after burning the in old fashioned shoe stores, provides a commodity in the human marketplace,” the words “Cogito Ergo Ars” into his right peepshow of mortality. Then there is “Paper conceptual artist and sculptor Chuck von buttock. Narcissus,” a life-size figure, as ghostly Schmidt (who seems to prefer the artistic Although the last word of that phrase white and detailed as George Segal’s plaster brand “von Schmidt” to his full name) could also suggest a play on the British people, of a man with a cast paper head appears to be every bit as in touch with slang term “arse,” it translates from the leaning over and pulling down his jeans the zeitgeist of his time as Andy Warhol Latin as “I THINK THEREFORE: to “moon” the viewer with his cast paper was when he predicted that in the future ART. This phrase can be interpreted as a buttocks. Those so bold as to gaze up we’d all be famous for fifteen his anus may be abashed at minutes. seeing themselves on “candid Indeed, Von Schmidt’s camera,” since few of us entire career over the past are as forthright as rock ‘n’ decade or so could be seen roller Iggy Pop, who recently as an ongoing performance told The New Yorker, “If piece, filled with episodes somebody has a nice ass crack, that range from installing a I am always interested to have sculpture of a monumental a look at it –– that’s the simian alligator at Woodstock ’94 to in me.” presenting Pope John Paul II For the most personal of with one of his commissioned reasons, this viewer found pieces in a special audience “Art Critic II,” a discarded at the Vatican –– an event casino slot machine converted as unexpected as when Bob into an aesthetic “peter Dylan serenaded the same meter” (to appropriate pontiff with “Knockin’ on Screw magazine’s term for Heaven’s Door” at a concert rating porno films), one of in the same venue. Yet if von Schmidt’s most potent von Schmidt is a brand, it is statements. By feeding constantly being repackaged quarters into this gorgeously (the silver fox of a GQ model garish object, newly furnished in the smart business suit with glowing glass panels glad-handing John Paul II that say “ART SCENE,” and seemed the antithesis of the (naturally) “COGITO ERGO longhaired art cowboy who ARS,” one can set snarky greeted me the last time I ran catchwords spinning and into him at Noho gallery), and “Paper Narcissus” partake in one of the world’s its content is constantly in flux. conceptual artist’s rationale for cognitive more dubious professions. In a previous photographic series in rather than intuitive expression. But given Another piece called “Hommage” which he posed as his father, von Schmidt the double-edged nature of von Schmidt’s features a film unfolding within the oval- explored that juncture of familial identity art, it could also imply that by being shaped opening of an antique porcelain that we all seem to reach at some point in branded with even the loftiest slogan we bedpan, in which von Schmidt, wearing adult life where we see the face of one or run the risk of becoming as depersonalized a ludicrous white frightwig and oversize the other of our parents staring back at and desensitized as those slabs of meat eyeglasses, bears an uncanny resemblance us from the mirror. In his new exhibition we’ve all seen on butcher’s blocks, to Andy Warhol. As in Andy’s earliest at Noho Gallery, he addresses issues of stamped “Gov’t Inspected Beef.” Only films, there is no sound and the camera is von Schmidt’s punningly titled six-foot stationary. Standing in front of New York von Schmidt, “Branded, ” Noho Gallery, tall artist’s mannequin, “Brussels Sprout,” Hospital, he fidgets and dithers distractedly, 530 West 25th Street, September 7 - inspired by Belgium’s famous fountain swallowing, blinking, looking distressed, his October 2, Opening reception: Saturday, statue of a urinating little boy, “Manneken face going through an entire repertoire of September 11, 4-6 PM Pis,” is immune to such humiliation. For nervous non-expressions. Then the most unlike Pinnochio, von Schmidt's dummy famous brand-name artist in the world self-invention peculiar to a period in which has no Jiminy Cricket to teach him right turns and disappears into the entryway of Warhol’s oft-repeated prophesy has finally from wrong. Branded on the butt with the the hospital where he was to die of medical come to pass with a vengeance. ubiquitous motto, he blithely takes aim at negligence, if not malpractice. Maybe we won’t become “fame the gallery wall. Mercifully, unlike early Warhol movies monsters” on the scale of Lady Gaga, “Many of my new pieces force the viewer such as “Sleep” and “Empire State but the proliferation of digital “social to strain to fully take in the work,” von Building,” which went on for several hours media” makes it possible for all of us to Schmidt states. “They are inspired by my with even less happening, von Schmidt’s create “advertisements for ourselves,” lifelong admiration of Duchamp’s last piece, deadpan bedpan film is just the perfect to democratize the title of a brashly ‘Etant Donné,’ where one exerts oneself length: fifteen minutes. narcissistic 1959 book of essays by that by peeking through knotholes in doors, in –– Ed McCormack pioneering literary self-brander Norman order to see the whole artwork.” 20 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 Bob Tomlinson: Embodying Love’s Mythic Sorrows ne of the themes most conspicuously luminous yellow shape that calls to mind Impossibles,” yet another female figure Oabsent from the figurative art of the lines, “I heard the singing of the flings her head back –– only, here, not to the last couple of centuries has been that Mississippi when Abe Lincoln/ went escape her lover’s embrace, but in a swoon of the human body’s innate heroism, as down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its of passion, her lips parted as though exemplified most grandly in the work of muddy / bosom turn all golden in the gasping for breath, as he nestles his cheek Michelangelo. What we are now more sunset.” It is as eloquent a dialogue against her neck, which lengthens in a often confronted by is a debasement between painting and literature as one can sensual curve, emphasized by an electric of the body: Robert Mapplethorpe ever recall seeing. blue line (a device he employs with various inserting a bull whip up his hues to define essential contours anus; Cindy Sherman’s creepy in his composition). Even in anti-erotic pictures of dolls the throes of his own passion, with grotesquely rearranged however, her ardent lover’s parts; Kiki Smith’s repulsive expression, as she thrusts her sculpture of a crawling nude voluptuous body against his woman emitting a long trail of in utter surrender, suggests an excrement. introspective grimace of possible Granted, such transgressive indeterminacy, signifying yet images may yet prove to be another face of love’s sorrow. valid expressions of at least Sorrow graduates to grief in one aspect of the zeitgeist, “Orphelia,” a favorite theme something that cannot be of the Pre-Raphaelites, which entirely ignored in whatever Tomlinson interprets in a much guise it presents itself. Yet it’s more starkly contemporary more than a little heartening, manner than Sir John Everett in an age at once secularly Millais’ idealized painting of enlightened and benumbed Hamlet’s spurned adolescent by trendy irony, to encounter lover, primly dressed and a painter like Bob Tomlinson, adorned with flowers, almost who restores not only the serenely sinking back to heroic but also the tragic drown herself in a placid river. dimension to the human figure, Tomlinson’s version shows while unabashedly celebrating Orphelia almost entirely its sensual vitality. submerged, only her face, Art historian Pierce Rice shoulders, and bare breasts once observed of Rubens visible, the nipples of the latter that what concerned him as pale as silver bullets and most was “the human body erected by the chill eddies of in dynamic movement, with water swirling about her –– as the specific dramatic activity if the artist is saying, “And here this movement contributed to is the frigid, mortified body of remaining entirely secondary.” love’s failure.” Yet he invests And the same might be even this harrowing image with surmised of Tomlinson, whose a terrible beauty, to borrow dramatically straining, twisting, “Amours impossibles” Yeats’ immortal phrase, by virtue and turning figures hark back of his richly bejeweled style, which to the Renaissance, even while flirting The title of the show, “Love and Other combines exquisite draftsmanship with with the spontaneous fluidity of Abstract Sorrows,” could also be a play on Harold elements of the rococo, the baroque, and Expressionism. Brodkey’s famous book of short stories art noveau, all melded and propelled by Tomlinson, a Brooklyn-born Jamaican- “First Love and Other Sorrows,” albeit abstract expressionist “push and pull.” American who, besides being a visual from a more world-weary perspective. Bob Tomlinson has stated that, for him, artist is a scholar of French literature Either way, Tomlinson’s richly nuanced “there is no clear distinction between and aesthetics residing for the most part compositions in oil paints combined naturalistically depicted or abstracted in France, carries more than the usual with textured and patterned papers figures,” and one of the more remarkable amount of cultural baggage. Hence, and occasional fragments of computer facets of his work is how successfully one can only assume that it was no manipulated photography achieve a sense he resolves this duality, merging diverse arbitrary decision for him to title one of romantic complexity and conflict that modes of expression in a brilliant characteristically flowing semiabstract is emotionally as well as aesthetically synthesis. composition in his current exhibition “I’ve engaging. –– Ed McCormack Known Rivers.” For the title derives from In “Amours Interdites,” for example, an the first line of Langston Hughes’ great opulently clothed woman, her hair flaring poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” like Medusa’s nest of writhing serpents, While the speaker in the poem turns her face away and raises a restraining references other rivers, including the hand to repel the advances of a cajoling Bob Tomlinson, Viridian Artists, Inc. Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile, the lover amid vertiginously surging abstract 530 West 25th Street, October 5 - 23. large blue-cast male profile that dominates color areas that recall the compositions Reception: Saturday October 9, 3-6pm. the composition of Tomlinson’s painting of Tiepolo at his most tumultuous. By Coffee/Conversation with the artist interfaces with a sinuously winding, contrast, in another oil called “Amours Saturday, October 23, 3-4 PM. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 21 Carrozzini’s Creative Currents Converge in Chelsea teffania Carrozzini, of I Am and interlock. As emblematic as the logo brilliant SInternational Art Media, Milan, Italy, for a product yet to be conceived, Baccari’s red acrylic. makes a persuasive case for good human sublimely hard-edged color areas provide The effect energy as an antidote to the “vibrational assurance against existential chaos, even is strangely quagmire of cell phones, internet, TV, while exploring along the borders of the skull-like with every sort of technological devilry,” in her unknown. the hollow characteristically poetic catalog essay for Masaki Asakawa, who once worked as receptacles “Frequency,” a recent exhibition featuring a graphic designer for Honda, employs becoming artists from Italy, Japan, and the U.S.. digital technology in a mixed media work shadow-filled New York painter Amy Cohen Banker suggesting a meticulously organized eye-sockets. seems a good place to start, since she automobile graveyard for brand new car Yet that Fabio Usvardi has always been on her own wavelength, bodies crammed in at various angles with the source channeling her painterly energies and surreal efficiency. Rather than polluting the materials impulses into a style that straddles the atmosphere with their fumes, Asakawa’s remain so obvious makes this mask-like abstract and the figurative. Elusive form, image seems to suggest, why not use their visage all the more unsettling, hinting that shimmering color, and untrammeled factory fresh chassis to create a kind of inanimate objects can’t be trusted not to gesture coalesce dynamically in Banker’s colorful industrial origami? undergo an unseemly metamorphosis. luminous oil on canvas “Oblique Fish,” A mysterious mixed media figure painting The abstract photographs of Giovanni with its Monet-like splinters of light by artist and alt-rock musician Elena Marinelli are deliberately created to Brambilla calls to mind “aura photography” redirect our gaze from the distractions Onishi Gallery, with a flesh-colored yet ethereal mass at of technology back to the by now, 521 West 26th Street the center of the composition more like (unfortunately) alternate reality of nature. www.onishigallery.com the ghostly manifestation of a soul than a One is immediately refreshed by Marinelli’s deconstructing the image of the fish even as physical being. And perhaps, in the present untitled photograph of what could be they chart its wiggling motion through the context, that is precisely the point: a portrait stalagmites or fragments of crystal, clustered watery depths. of the spiritual frequency of humanity. like tall grass in a field. That the picture is By contrast, painter and celebrated Michela Ianese, conjures up an equally printed on clear plastic seems not so much product designer Alberto Baccari’s acrylic eerie presence through contrastingly an ironic touch as heartening evidence of painting “Graphic # 4,” anchors irregularly physical means, with her assemblage of how unlikely materials can be transformed. curricular forms within stringently an ordinary egg crate affixed inside-out Using finger-painting as a way of geometric borders with which they interact to a canvas and overpainted entirely with Continued on page 23 The Tactile/Coloristic Symphonics of Yuta Strega lthough she received though the artist discovers savoring such paintings by Strega as “Bol en Aher early art education them within areas of paint that Mouvement” and “Jarre d’Antibes,” where at the College of Fine arts could suggest an armature of the recognizable shapes of various vessels in Frankfurt, Germany, Yuta cubism partially deconstructed appear as prominent elements in Strega’s Strega lives in France and by impulsive, surging tides of otherwise abstract compositions. But the works in a studio that, in the abstract expressionism. resemblance to the older artists goes even poetic description of one writer Here and there, in Strega’s deeper, extending to the paint quality itself, “opens onto a long downward ostensibly abstract compositions which lends these paintings a tactile appeal sloping garden where vegetal vestiges of the figure intrude, that complements their chromatic beauty. shapes and colors mingle, then as seen in “A Tempo, Tempo In other oils on linen such as “Tremelo” stretches into an infinite rolling Primo,” and “Anges Déchus.” and “Arpeggio,” the musical terms call landscape.” And as bucolic as In both paintings there is a attention to the lilting compositional that setting sounds, Strega’s “A Tempo, Tempo Primo” sense of jostling crowds, and rhythms and subtleties of color that seem oils on linen exemplify all of in the latter there are traces of to function like melodies woven through the urbane sophistication that one associates facial features on the “fallen angels,” with the movements of a symphony. Here, with the School of Paris at its best. vertical forms in the background suggesting recognizable forms of figures are less The canvas that hints most directly at urban architecture. And in another oil on obvious, except perhaps for the faint faces the artist’s pastoral environment is also one linen called “A Tempo Replica” the large emerging from the shimmering veils of of her most thoroughly abstract: “Home rectangular shape in the mostly red area at color in “Arpeggio,” like ghosts serenely Sweet Home” is a lyrical exploration of pale the top of the canvas reads as a building, transported by the music. yet luminous green, yellow, and blue hues while the forms at the bottom could be seen Indeed, although the primary focus of glowing amid amorphous forms that evoke as foreground figures somewhat obscured her paintings is their abstract attributes, a dreamy atmosphere rather than a specific by blurred movement, sunlight, and which are more than sufficient to hold and sense of place, a magical mood of summer possibly smoke or smog. capture our attention, such details are bonus and sunlight. The total effect is of the miasma of surprises that make the paintings of Yuta In other paintings by Strega, more intense the city rendered majestic by virtue of Strega all the more pleasurable. tonal contrasts prevail, and references of beautifully harmonized colors, with people ––Byron Coleman the figure, architecture and objects may melded like a bouquet of flowers by a be discerned among the jewel like colors seamless artistic vision. What could be and strongly structured abstract forms. In chaotic and transitory is made immutable by these works the term “color construction” a luscious painterly panache that tempts one Yuga Strega, Agora Gallery, 530 West applies most aptly, given that shapes seem to compare Strega to Nicholas de Staël. 25th Street. October 5-26. Reception: to result from the act of painting itself, as Indeed de Staël comes to mind in Thursday, October 7, 6-8 PM. 22 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 The Galactic Scope of the Painter Called Cody he artist named Paul M. Cote, who surfaces,” and creating what critic Emily Tprefers to sign his paintings with and be Genauer once referred to as “not technical known by the pseudonym of Cody, refers fireworks but a symbolic skin containing the to his creative project as “topographical, mysteries of life and death.” real/surreal paintings.” And indeed that Certainly Cody appears to achieve title seemed apt for his thickly textured something similar in his imposing, luminous compositions in his recent Chelsea solo canvases, which go far beyond a scientific, exhibition, which imbued often ethereal diagrammatic approach to the galaxies and metaphysical subjects with a physical to address the ineffable mystery of the presence verging on the sculptural. cosmos themselves, with their freely floating Like Jackson Pollock before him, Cody forms and radiant auras, as seen in the “Liquos” prefers to work with the canvas on the aforementioned “Solar,” where golden ground or the floor of his studio on a large orbs appear to emit light that envelopes undersea flora are juxtaposed with scale. Like the great abstract expressionist, the viewer. Equally dynamic is “Liquos,” planetary orbs as colorful as jugglers balls too, his approach is actively physical, with in which a monolithic ovoid central orbiting amid an atmospheric purple haze. paint applied sans plan, spontaneously, in form appears within a dark cosmic space Another especially colorful composition layer after layer, often over lengthy periods surrounded by a smoky halo of gaseous in which several smaller shapes surround of time. His thickly encrusted surfaces, like antimatter made paradoxically palpable in a central solar shape emitting an axle-like those of Larry Poons, take on great weight thick pigment. In much the same manner configuration of white rays like the great and depth. The composition evolves in the that one can hear a ghostly semblance to wheel of the universe is called “Heart act of painting, and although they could Cody, Attack.” This might seem incongruous be perceived at first glance as abstract, they seen recently at Agora Gallery, if not for the artist’s own statement that are actually inspired by the artist’s lifelong 530 West 25th Street. each of his paintings has at least four or five interest in science fiction and the universe. www.agora-gallery.com different meanings. Often the viewer is tipped off to this by the sea’s roar in a sea shell, one can feel its Such subjective complexity, come to titles such as “Solar,” “Planet Gaseous,” or fearsome force by proxy in this evocative think of it, is just what one would expect “Milky Way,” and knowing Cody’s intent shape with its eddies of cerulean blue of a painter as ambitious as Cody, the makes the narrative aspect of his painting whirling within its great yawning breadth and scope of whose work takes immediately evident to the naked eye. galactic yap. in vast imaginative expanses. Indeed, as Although his style is unique, perhaps his In another acrylic on canvas called other intriguing titles such as “Hell,” closest artistic relative is the Belgian painter, “Protection,” Cody Reveals a gift for “Wormhole,” and “Un Invicto Nuovo” Octave Landuyt, another artist whose biomorphic form akin to that of the make clear, we are dealing here with an work probes the “experienced” aspect of abstract expressionist William Baziotes artist whose horizons appear virtually inanimate nature through the working and with a composition where vividly golden unlimited. reworking of what that artist calls “essential tendril-like shapes resembling wiggling –– Maurice Taplinger
CARROZZINI different works are united by Sochorova’s singular compositional Continued from page 22 ability. achieving intimacy and transmitting his own frequency to the Simple forms, coupled with lusciously sensual paint surfaces canvas by both smearing and dripping his oil pigments, Fabio and an anthropomorphic approach to botanical shapes make Amy Usvardi animates figurative realism with Pollock-like splashes and Rosenfeld’s floral compositions especially memorable. Like the drips. We may not be sure whether the shut eyes and wide open American Expressionist Jay Milder, Rosenfeld lends heft and depth mouth of the young woman in Usvardi’s portrait “Neda” indicate to her nature subjects by virtue of a singular painterly vision. agony or ecstasy, but the energy it exudes is undeniable. –– Maurice Taplinger Born in Hitachi Japan in 1942, veteran artist Misa Aihara appears to be a deeply intuitive painter, expressing the impressions received by his five senses through abstract color construction. Subtly harmonized patches of layered color work like notes in a musical composition to create exquisite chromatic balances with which Hitachi transmits a sense of serene transcendence to viewers attuned to his rarified frequency. –– Ed McCormack Art Works SALON SHOW Continued from pg. 10 Fine Arts Exhibit in which a comicstrip beauty, resembling Dagwood’s better half Blondie, outshines the structure of the title by virtue of October 13–31, 2010 Zimmerman’s clean lines and confectionery colors. Linda Lessner’s Curators: Linda Lessner & Carole Barlowe mastery of the pastel medium lends her delicate little landscape compositions a unique freshness, particularly in “Robert Frost Carole Barlowe • Robin Goodstein • Madi Lanier Country,” where a slender tree branch, a snippet of lawn, and a Linda Lessner • Marian McNamara • Marie Robison fragment of pond speak volumes. Also quite magical is Lessner’s Beatrice Rubell • Ava Schonberg • Jutta Filippelli “Waterfall,” in which the frothy cascade is skillfully evoked in a mere few inches. Broadway Mall Community Center In one of her acrylic paintings Eva Sochorova puts her own Broadway@96 St. (NYC) Center Island dynamic spin on the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm with her blocky red, yellow, and purple forms; while in another, still- life it is subjected to a severe formal distillation. Yet these distinctly ^ZHJU`'^ZHJU`VYN ^^^^ZHJU`VYN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO 23 Phenomena and Paradox in the Art of Michèle Vincent urrealism as a elongated chess board that Smovement may also fades into the air and a have given the widely nearby body of water in a exhibited contemporary manner that lends a quite French painter literal dimension to the term Michèle Vincent “vanishing perspective.” the wherewithal to As for the chess pieces with pursue dreams and which the two spectral fantasies as an artistic women conduct their direction. However, as game, they too are of an in the case of her best otherworldly aspect –– predecessors, it is her particularly the tallest one singular vision which in the foreground, which finally distinguishes her resembles a transparent work from that of all crystal cone with the tiny others. figure of a handsome blond “Rebirth,” one youth apparently trapped of Vincent’s recent within like a goldfish fish paintings, is one of her in a tank –– their magical most complex in terms appearance suggests the of the vast sphere of players may be symbolic of metaphysical elements the Fates. and dimensions it Here, again, the appears to encompass. luminous clarity of Indeed, a viewer Vincent’s technique, which can stand before it “Rebirth” apparently involves the for an inordinate layering of semi-translucent Runge, a lesser known contemporary of amount of time without feeling that he oil glazes in the manner of the Flemish Caspar David Friedrich. or she has absorbed its full meaning. But masters, enables her to achieve a seamless But where Runge, who hoped to revive one is mightily impressed by the artist’s synthesis of matter and antimatter, which Christian religious painting for a new age, harmonious melding of solid and ethereal makes even the most phenomenal acts of envisions a more or less predictably pastoral elements in a composition that seems in the metamorphosis that she depicts appear as Promised Land of verdant fields, abundant process of dissolving and coming into being natural as rain. And, indeed, in the context fruits, and fluttering putti surrounding simultaneously; of alternately deconstructing of these paintings, they truly may be; for a central angelic figure of light, Vincent itself and being reborn before one’s eyes in hers is a world possessed of its own unique evokes a more mysteriously murky realm a manner entirely apropos of its title and natural laws. At very least, these paintings of melting vegetation and spectral figures ostensible theme. may allude to the artist’s intuitive perception in flux, suggesting perhaps one of many The “framework” of the picture, for want of hidden laws that operate beneath the way stations in a cycle of reincarnation. of a better term with which to describe visible surface of the daily reality that we all While a stately woman in a blue robe, it, is a border of precisely delineated small take for granted. partially blurred as if by movement in a royal rectangles containing luminous images of In the final analysis, however, many of the procession, dominates the foreground with trees and intricate foliage resembling, with images in Michèle Vincent’s compositions her queenly grace, in the middle distance their delicate tints of pink and aquamarine, elude exact interpretation to simply delight of the composition two pastel-gowned as well as for the almost abstract patterns us with their intriguing incongruities. What female beings with long, flowing tresses that they form as the result of their repetitive is one to make, for example, of a painting embrace, as though in reunion, in front of a motifs and designs, those elaborate Tiffany such as “The Church in Ruin, the Wise, and gray rectangular form suggesting a slab-like stained glass panels in the American Wing the Wolf,” where the skeletal supporting aboveground tomb. of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The arches of a great cathedral, overgrown with “Rebirth” is an especially vital addition technical finesse with which Vincent brings sun-splashed foliage, open to the sky for to Michèle Vincent’s generally ambitious off this effect seems all the more remarkable blue birds to fly through, becoming an oeuvre in terms of instituting a new spiritual when one learns that she is self-taught. airy promenade where a couple in archaic iconography in tune with the more complex One can only compare the contrasts dress, the woman’s fairness shaded by a way in which we think about matters of life, that the artist creates between this strongly pink parasol, stroll about with their pet death, and spirit in this secular age, when structured surrounding border of trees wolf by their side? Could this be a new kind some of us, while far from being agnostics, and foliage and the more fluidly dissolving of “peaceable kingdom,” free of stifling still long for a less simplistic approach to forms at the center of the composition –– religious doctrine, where man and beast can the ineffable mysteries of eternity and the where smoky mists, a shifting sense of light coexist in heavenly harmony at last? What unknown. then of another painting in which flowing In “Chess Game in Nature,” another Michèle Vincent (year-round salon platinum strands of a sleeping beauty’s hair recent painting by Vincent, two of the exhibition), Montserrat Contemporary merge with the fur in the head of a wolf beautiful, ethereal female presences who Art Gallery, 547 West 27th Street hovering like a full moon above a pack of figure prominently in many of her paintings montserratgallery.com darker canine cousins whose coats glisten and whom we seem to be encouraged that appears to emanate from no known like nocturnal ocean waves? to regard as spirits, as opposed to earthly source, and intimations of a spiritual realm That the paintings of Michèle Vincent are beings, given how they partially disappear suggesting the afterlife –– to the similarly filled with such paradoxical imagery makes into the atmosphere, are seen seated amid striking contrasts in “Morning,” an 1803 them endlessly intriguing to contemplate. tall weeds and feathery foliage at an ornate, canvas by the German painter Philip Otto –– Byron Coleman 24 GALLERY&STUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 MARGARET GRIMES New Work DEGREES OF ABSTRACTION OCTOBER 5 - OCTOBER 26, 2010 Reception: Thursday, October 7, 6 - 8 pm
“Rosy Dawn; Washington” Oil on Canvas 16"x16" October 5th–30th, 2010 Reception: Tuesday, October 7, 5 – 8 pm Blue Mountain Gallery 530 West 25th Street 4th Fl NYC 10001 - 36” x 30” 646 486 4730 Tues - Sat 11 - 6 www.bluemountaingallery.org Journey of a Woman (Mother and Child) - Ella Prakash ©
Nissim Ben Aderet Kristina Garon Claudia Manperl João Paramés Ella Prakash Henriette Tibbs
530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 www.Agora-Gallery.com [email protected]
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 GALLERY&STUDIO