April 1 to May 1 at 299 Meserole Street, Ground Floor Rear, between Waterbury and Bogart streets, Brooklyn
Six powerful, lyrical, at once absorbing and theatrical canvases, patched together from separate panels and each seven feet tall by a little more than that in width, hang unstretched like baronial tapestries in a raw white cube in Bushwick. We clearly aren’t in the territory of painterly propaganda or nostalgia in this show titled “The Revolution will be Painted”. Anne Sherwood Pundyk entreats us to forget David or Delacroix as surely as television. The revolutions in play could as well be planetary, or indeed stylistic, as social or political. Pundyk’s painterly strategies are well suited to ambiguities of direction and speed. But her paintings sing with creative tension. It feels as if their execution could equally have taken place on floor or wall. The imagery pivots – or, rather, ricochets – between intentionality and provisionalism. Sprawling, amorphous spreads of stain cohabit with meticulous, dexterous graphic markmaking. The eye is lured into deep space even as surface actualities protrude. Grids and drips have learned to live with each other—or else we are witnessing the calm before the storm of their final showdown.