Janet Kurnatowski’s Greenpoint basement gallery is often the locus of lively, even raucous installations. In one packed group exhibition a guest curator even took to hanging works from the low ceiling. In Soundings the volume is turned down and the music is all the more penetrating for it.
Abstract painters Elizabeth Hazan and Jennifer Riley make an exquisite duo. The alternating hang accentuates the distinctions between Riley’s chirpy, lassoed forms in shrill, synthetic, hard-to-name colors and Hazan’s fuzzy, somewhat nebulous, yet contradictorily at the same time blocked-out, jigsawish compositions that lure you into unexpected depths of warmth and resonance. But while the eye savors the individuality of each painter as an ear would the contrast of, say, piano and violin, so too it soon becomes apparent that a playful conversation of rare intelligence is underway, harmonizing with one another in allusions to the legacies of modernism and reaching teasing dissonances upon abstraction’s possibilities.
Presto: the show closes Sunday.
September 9 to October 9, 2011 at 205 Norman Avenue at Humboldt Street, Brooklyn, 718 383 9380.
