SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com VOL. 14 NO. 1 New York GALLERYSTUDIO SENATEDELLA! The New York Art World’s Controversial Gadfly, Robert Cenedella, Skewers the U.S. Senate plus: LOOKING FOR AMERICA, another excerpt from Ed McCormack’s memoir in progress HOODLUM HEART pg. 14 Norman Perlmutter “ORDINARY THINGS” “File Box,” Acrylic on Canvas, 24"x30" “File Box,” October 25 – November 8, 2011 Tues - Sun 2-7pm Artist’s Receptions: Thurs., Oct. 27 & Fri., Nov 4, 6-8pm 2/20 Gallery 220 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011 212-807-8348 — www.220gallery.net TINA ROHRER Awash in Blue and Green Geometric acrylic paintings presenting color interactions and impresssions of movement “Accent Aqua II,” Acrylic, 18"x18" “Accent Aqua II,” Dates: October 4-October 29, 2011 Reception: Saturday, October 8, 4-6 PM :HVWWK6W1<& 7XHV6DWDPSP ZZZQRKRJDOOHU\FRP GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GS Highlights On the Cover: Cenedella Takes On The Teabaggers –– pg. 9 PLUS: Eloping to the tune of a Simon & Garfunkel song ... Living a La Boheme fantasy like incestuous siblings in a blue Sharyn Finnegan, pg. 8 collar family attic ... Starry-eyed on the brink of nuclear apocalypse ... the HOODLUM HEART saga continues –– pg.14 Joan Marie Kelly, pg. 20 Catherine de Saugy, pg. 21 Marcia Clark, Malka Inbal, pg. 7 Tina Rohrer, pg. 4 pg. 5 Subscribe to GALLERYSTUDIO GALLERYSTUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription $47 International $5 Back Issues PUBLISHED BY Mail check or Money Order to: ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn City www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip 2 GALLERYSTUDIO SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 Many Paths Converge in New Century Group Show ike phrases such as “uncontrollable within an atmospheric existential void. painted in a style influenced by realistic Lurges” or “unsolicited advice,” Carol Pepper-Cooper evokes her own comic strip art, within a lively context “Undeniable Tendencies” is an rarefied dream realm in paintings of combining elements of Pop and admittedly novel concept for an crowds of small figures gathering as geometric abstraction. The versatile exhibition; yet it applies quite literally if for some spiritual act of witness in painter Ismena Halkiewicz, however, to some of the trends spotted in the landscapes that range from the hellishly employs diverse figurative strategies intriguing group exhibition of that name. fiery to the sumptuously heavenly, as ranging from fractured cubist planes seen in one work where mountainous containing eyes and other facial features, Prominent among them is a species candles burn amid more dispersed to a brilliantly hued and radically of organic abstraction exemplified by conflagrations that appear dangerously distorted New Image manner, to the Mira Satryan,” whose punningly titled close to consuming the shadowy gracefully stylized female nude floating painting “The Bright Site of the Moon” pilgrims, and another in which figures amid amber waves in her painting is notable for its muscularly configured clad in brilliant blue convene gaily amid “Honey.” forms and a palette combining cosmic giant flowers and marmalade hills. Then blue and visceral red hues. Another there is the painterly wizard known Wojtek Pakowski attacks the figure gifted abstract painter, Basha simply as Wioska, who weaves lyrical with the entire arsenal of abstract Maryanska, appears even more directly spells in a palette of pale yet luminous expressionism –– its slashing strokes, beholden to nature in “Toward Light,” hues, summoning softly diffused figures drips, and violent gestural thrusts where she accomplishes the seeming to emerge from pastel mists amid –– to activate the human figure with a alchemical feat of evoking the most picturesque ruins and fanciful landscapes passionate energy, as seen in “Spotlight,” ethereal of subjects in the material enlivened by delicate flora, fauna and where a lithe yet voluptuous nude diva, substance of pigment, with shimmering phantom faces hovering in midair. perhaps a pole-dancer in a Times Square showers of luminous golden yellow bar, occupies center stage in hazy red strokes streaming down like heavenly Assemblage would also appear to be light, and “Adam and Eve,” in which the beams. thriving, judging from Steven Rodrig’s sexual tension between the two figures is wonderfully zany neo-dada sculptures made palpable in pigment. More geometric styles of abstraction, intricately constructed from computer albeit subtly modulated with scumbled innards with titles such as “Data Roach By contrast, the symbolic figures surfaces and layered palimpsests and Motel,” “Attempt to Transfer Data painted by Kathryn Hart are, pentimento, also made a strong showing into the Organic World V-9,” and so paradoxically, physical and spectral at in the work of two other painters: While on –– all of which appear to be about the same time, given the artist’s use of serving as a striking formal armature the frustrations of conducting a sane thick impasto to evoke featureless beings for these compositions, Jan Niksinski’s human life within an increasingly virtual that emerge from painterly swirls and rectangular shapes simultaneously allude reality. One was also quite transported by spatters, taking on an almost haunting to windows and architectural structures, Helen Zajkowski’s “American Dream” presence akin to the emaciated sculptures while paying homage to artistic installation, a model home with a facade of Giacometti. Quite an opposite effect predecessors with titles such as “My covered entirely by lotto tickets and a is created in the unusual medium of home with the cross of Tapies/recycling cut-a-way back revealing rooms filled wire mesh by Bonnie Shanas, who 2009,” and “Naturelle abstraction or talk with gilded grownup and baby shoes, its achieves a remarkably detailed semblance with Mark Rothko.” Witold Adamczyk, message as poignantly redolent of broken of classical anatomy in a seemingly on the other hand, employs a varied dreams as what Ernest Hemingway unyielding industrial material, imbuing vocabulary of geometrically derived came up with when a drinking buddy her single or entwined nude figures forms in shaped canvases and modular challenged him to write a novel in six with a sensual grace that harks back formats in which recurring motifs and words: “For sale: baby shoes, never to sculptural fragments salvaged from slightly shifting color values create used.” antiquity. chromatic frisson within emblematic compositions. That more traditional three- Then there is the photographic artist dimensional art forms also continue Susan Hammond, who evokes an idyllic Quite an opposite aesthetic made an to gain aesthetic traction was made menage a trois in almost cinematic terms, appearance in the work of artists who strikingly clear by the prolific sculptor in a sequence of images in which a young specialize in fantasy and fabulation, as David Green, whose works in stone, woman watches from a rock as a couple seen in “Call a Lady,” Karin Zukowski’s wood, and bronze range from swims in a lake below, before joining wildly imaginative oil of a one-armed gracefully swirling organic abstract them, the three comely nude swimmers woman holding an egg with a human forms to a severely simplified female merging harmoniously in a romantic face aloft as an anthropomorphic bird figure, all sharing an exquisite formal water ballet amid the sparkling ripples. perches on her helmut-shaped coiffure, reductiveness. as well as in her more down-to-earth yet Undeniable tendencies indeed! ironically titled mother and child diptych Although no one needs to tell us at “Bourgeois Emancipation.” Elizabeth this late date that figurative art remains –– Maurice Taplinger Castonguay evoked a neo-surreal an undeniable tendency, it’s heartening private realm as mysterious as that of anyway to see how many artists in this Odd Nerdrum, in her darkly nocturnal show have headed Pound’s exhortation paintings of realistically rendered to “make it new.” Marian Solisz, for Undeniable Tendencies, New Century human figures set nakedly adrift in the example, presents erotically suggestive Artists Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, company of exotic birds or butterflies close-ups of female anatomy, pristinely August 29 - September17, 2011. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011 GALLERYSTUDIO 3 A Classical Concern: The Abiding Art of Tina Rohrer o keep the faith of geometric painting Rohrer creates a subtly, Tin the postmodern era requires shimmering optical frisson. considerable conviction, not to mention And in the six modular courage. But it is doubtful that, in the units that make up the privacy of her studio, basking in the warm composition called “Awash chromatic glow that radiates from her in Blue and Green,” where vibrant acrylic paintings, Tina Rohrer ever pure white squares mingle thinks of it that way. Surely she must be (like windows on the wall too engrossed in the primacy of pure form ) in not quite random and color as visual conduits to the sublime patterns among others in to even consider the imperatives of an art the blue, green, aqua range, market desperately dependent on novelty yet optically scintillating and what the Australian art critic and TV chromatic epiphanies commentator Robert Hughes once called reward the attentive viewer. “the shock of the new.” (Never mind that Nothing could be novelty has a notoriously short shelf life more “fraught with and we are by now so benumbed as to be imminent peril,” as W.C. virtually unshockable.) Fields used to put it, for Tina Rohrer’s allegiances have never a colorist of Rohrer’s been to the passing trends of disposable seductiveness, than to culture anyway. She defers only to such risk a monochromatic distinguished predecessors as Seurat and composition.