On view as part of the artist’s solo exhibition, “From Afar,” which opens Thursday at Marlborough Chelsea (alongside the sculptural installation of artcritical’s September “logo artist” Will Ryman). The title of Hershberg’s show alludes both to the long distances from which he paints his panoramas (click the image to see the full “cinescope” format of his eight foot-wide canvas) and to the fact that in Hebrew, “afar” also means “dust.” “All that dust in the aria hangs over everything, defining a seemingly endless nothingness into a measured and felt diaphanous volume of ether that starts where the eye begins to see,” the artist has written. Many of Hershberg’s vistas revisit vantage points of Corot paintings, what he calls the C-spots, which presumably is a painter’s equivalent of hitting a landscape’s G-spot? Hershberg is the founder of theJerusalem Studio School, an academy that fosters a traditional approach to painting, and which runs a summer program in Umbria. A gala for the School will take place at Andrea Meislin Gallery on September 16.
This was an artcritical PIC in September 2009.
print