April 4 to May 25, 2018 (extended)
67 East 80th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, victoriamunroefineart.com.

Laura Newman makes abstract paintings whose points of departure are instances in her life. She draws upon the world around her, from memories and places or from speculative reality. While her work has always been characterized by a remarkable range of mediums and techniques, her latest show, at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, presents a shift from the recent planar distillations of built and natural environments to an all-over sense of dispersion. A number of new elements and approaches generate paintings and works on paper that reinvigorate and update discourse concerning the tension between brushstroke and overall image. A similar dichotomy emerges between distance or remove (of the hand, for instance) and the literalness of surface. An allusion to deep space collides with taut flat areas of color hemmed in and held in place by a variety of lines and textured planes.

Those familiar with the artist’s 25-year plus career will recall the way that structure was presented in earlier works as hard edged geometric forms, crisp lines, transparent planes and flattening of form. In more recent work, nameable things such as billboards, houses, doors, and, in and swooping landscapes, fields were identifiable. What now establishes guidelines for the viewer are colossal strokes, elongated collage-like shards of color and thin exploratory lines. Compositional ambiguity, a thickening of atmosphere and a sense of disruption add to an already robust list of qualities and information that establish spatial inversions, engendering a sense of negation and contradiction. Just as collage cracked open Matisse’s practice, so too it is having a similar effect for Newman, only in her hands, collage elements are in fact sly trompes l’oeil of collage, shapes such as those aforementioned shards, that expand the facture of the work and reflect an understated ease and mastery of materials.

Newman conjures varied moods in this show that lead us on non-verbal paths of visual exploration. One painting suggests night walks in a city under construction; others suggest dreamscapes of layered experience; others still are closer to being pure abstraction. Despite being as varied and inventive as they are eccentric and awkward, all her images feel tangible. We can locate ourselves in them.

In Ghost Ship (2015), Newman uses rough, near brutal, black strokes over prepared white ground in a way that puts us in mind of a master of Japanese brush painting. Flat brown shards cluster into an A-frame against an impossibly bright, deep blue sky. Areas of intentionally unpainted raw linen become planes of light and air captured between what could be described as masts. There is an upward thrust to the composition lending these ‘masts’ a menacing quality. The feeling of the blue is at once optimistic and threatening. The roughness of the dark strokes is softened only by elegantly painted jewel-like shards of color, as in much of the work, larger brush strokes, convincingly conveyed as dry brush marks or rendered as flat planes, are deployed to organize increasingly smaller elements in a pulsating space.

Open framework, shards recalling construction tags and flags and the titles themselves suggest that the built environment continues to concern the artist. Rome Studio (2017) places the artist in the “la citta eternale,” itself a wonder of all things built, designed, rebuilt and reinvented. Camera (2017), whose title could either allude to a room or the tool with a mechanical inner eye, and Slice (2017), each contain elements that evince a focus on the layering and widening of time and space, of humanity’s trace on nature and the environments we occupy.

Located in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), the artist has witnessed at close hand and warped speed the shift of scale (economic and physical wrought by social gentrification. Glass curtain-walled ky scrapers sprout in every direction and scaffolding abounds. Steel framing of the next building under construction and girders, planes and machinery dotting the landscape inform structures in her works, while bright safety colors of orange, yellow, green and neon pink seem to have crept into her palette. Reach (2018), at five foot wide one of the largest canvases in the show, has thinned black paint forming a window-like structure opened to an abstracted watery vista. Thin strips and strokes of color pass through the structure in a twisting dynamic as if caught in a powerful gust of wind. Black strokes made with a dry-brush originate at the top of the canvas where they suggest a window frame that turns into thin lines resembling feet as the eye follows the strokes to the bottom of the image. Thus, as is often the case in Newman’s work, planes, marks and strokes perform double duty, typifying her disregard for the separation between abstraction and representation by weaving identifiable forms into an abstract image.

The idea that an abstract painting can be proportionally real is not new per se and yet how it is achieved here feels vital and urgent. Newman upends our often-precarious grasp on what we might think we are seeing, as much in terms of medium as image, by blurring boundaries, for example, between collage, drawing and painting. Her work inverts expectations of depth and flatness co-mingling foreground with background.

I have have come to think of Laura Newman as the abstract companion to the realist Catherine Murphy, whose terrific exhibition at Peter Freedman this winter served as an encyclopedic statement of contemporary life. In Murphy, images are wholly realistic while the attitude and ideas they arouse are highly abstract. We peer closely at details of a frontal portrait of a stack of books while being nudged to feel or to think about a myriad of concerns, whether the legacy of minimalism or the fate of pharaonic libraries carved in temple columns, or the advent of eBooks. The multiplicity of technique and perspective in Newman’s work has comparably far ranging philosophical and metaphorical implications: her concerns for local populations and the changing environment, for example, are channeled through formal innovations and inquiries—long a hallmark of New York painting culture. A great deal of contemporary painting seems freighted by concepts that have scant bearing upon what it actually delivers: think of those politically heavy handed curatorial statements in the New Museum’s Triennial with their attempt to force meaning. In Laura Newman and Catherine Murphy’s work, the experience of how someone is thinking and being in the world is manifest.

The post Being in the World: Laura Newman at Victoria Munroe appeared first on artcritical.

May 31 to July 10, 2016
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City (212) 673-6466

Driving on winding country roads one often sees the cautionary yet poetic sounding sign “Bridge Freezes Before the Road”. You know to check your speed, pay attention to the surface and be warned for vehicles to spontaneously spin out of control on black ice or hidden pockets of slush in otherwise apparently normal circumstances. As a show title, “Bridge Freezes Before the Road” alerts us to slippery conditions and challenging possibilities of Cora Cohen’s paper surface.

Cohen is a formidable abstract painter who is known for deploying several different mediums and approaches within a single work. Recent bodies of work strive to make the act of perceiving or making the major preoccupation of the work. There are hints of her historical influences, whether Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Wols, art brut, art informel, New York School painting or Far Eastern art, to name a few, but her subjects, choice of materials and themes come from her own reserves.

This show, which was curated by Karen Wilkin, is a perfect opportunity to glimpse at how the artist might see drawings as they are being made in her studio, as, unframed, they are informally pinned up and hung in groups that may or may not relate to a larger painting or signal a nascent theme. The show comprises 27 works from the last decade made on synthetic and natural papers, in sizes ranging from 9 by 12 to 22 by 30 inches with titles such as “Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series” or named according to dates in action or completion. The titles are unambiguous despite the somewhat generic dating. They underscore, as does the title of the exhibition that the artist works from her experiences of first sight, combined with a very wide range of influences that she draws away from as the works themselves develop. I list the materials: graphite, acrylic gesso, acrylic medium, watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, pastel, Flashe, archival ink-jet, wood-veneer, pigment – not because the amount of them is so extraordinary by today’s standards, but because of how well she knows them and in turn coaxes freshness out of them in drawings of delightfully unexpected combinations and poetic compositions.

In 08-15, (2015) fragmented sinewy crayon lines meander over a richly developed whitish surface. Traces of lines can be found below areas of added colors of minty green, blue, yellow and coral. At a glance an image of a figure in a squatting position with a large right foot at the bottom of the page might be found but as your eye slows and the upper half of the page is explored, now an aerial view of land in which solid forms begin to appear as pattern. Maps, seasons, climate changes and such seem to be collecting on the page. Washes of grey have the effect of toning down clacking yellows, while dry pastel seems to be blanketing the lower portion. Something that is very powerful in this particular work is the way it can make us feel engaged in discovery as we look. The surprise of seeing entire worlds encircled below certain areas with marks and textural shifts keep us searching for more. It is as if the sounds of a full orchestra are made by just a clutch of instruments. And as in a concert hall, the worlds one viewer finds won’t necessarily correspond to the discoveries of another.

In 015-11, (2011) veils of delicately hued liquid cover much of the off-square format. Brushstrokes sink into the creamy paper: successive layers lighten some areas while in other places pigments bleed and pool to make natural edges for new shapes. Drips and splatters become attributes or relationships rather than signifiers of process because in Cohen’s work, everything gets worked into the image. A big swath of a cloudy medium collects and dries in the lower left half of the page forming crystalline shapes like those found on freezing windows. Four or five biomorphic forms, hovering atop it all, are significantly more densely colored than the environment they occupy. Their edges are circumnavigated by colored pencil and graphite in repeated routes that frequently slip away from the forms they describe, to instead create areas that invite the viewer to mentally fill them in. There is a smoldering awareness that as these floating things resolve into one form or object then like a cloud they can becomes another. It is something of this world, with its allusions to atmosphere, lichen, algae, crystalline forms and geological peaks and something of an altogether alien plane, a hybrid existence.

The post Slippery Conditions: A Show of Drawings by Cora Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

March 12 through April 18, 2015
443 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 967 4972

Oh the grid! The enduring inheritance of Africa, absorbed by the West through Modernism, the grid continues to be a beguiling structure for abstract painters today, the uses ranging from sophisticated play with the grid as trope to culturally driven references to textiles, patterns, architecture, urbanism.

The grid paintings of Russell Roberts belong to a line with roots to Hans Hofmann and branches to such contemporaries as Joan Waltemath, Stanley Whitney and Stephen Westfall, albeit that each of these artists have very different aesthetic intentions in their work with the grid.

Roberts’ previous decades of work had no repeated structure or system, no set scale, frame or image, palette or approach. The paintings yielded multiple gestalts and were provocative explorations that combined painting history with personal imagery in terms that were unique to each painting. These new grid paintings, therefore, represent a dramatic departure for him. Roberts has reprised familiar elements of an older image of his own, one that sees complex blue grounds, violet shapes, and both rough hewn and delicate lines in orange and brown. In canvases nearly identical in scale, white or blue rectangles are deployed as modular components in a system of template-derived lines and areas that are intricately connected by fluid curvilinear lines.

These grid-based compositions are uniform from canvas to canvas but within the multiplicity of parts there is immense variation, and differences emerge. Roberts’ grid brings to mind rows of windows on a building in which each aperture describes the variable and the constant — rather than, say, evoking a checkerboard or gingham print. With an urban feel to them, they are about how people live, about chance encounters and social serendipity. Here, variously sized blue vertical or horizontal rectangles are stacked atop each other creating large zones or areas, producing dynamic pictorial relationships as well as a strong surface design.

Heskin Contemporary is a ground-level, north-of-Chelsea gallery space with an old-school downtown feel to it: its long narrow asymmetrical rooms are the antithesis of the white cube. Rather than overwhelming this cozy gallery, Roberts’ eight large, uniformly sized, off-square canvases and one medium sized outlier lent unexpected expansiveness to the space. The paintings are window-like in scale, structure and color alike, and the blue rectangles, painted and full of air, offer glimpses of deep space. A datum linking all eight paintings is formed by horizontal white or bare surfaces that define the top edges of the consistent lower third portion of each painting. The repetition of these strong “lines” link the paintings and reiterate the shape of the architecture of the gallery, visually unifying the latter’s disparate sections.

Roberts engages the unending argument between material and pictorial form using a broad spectrum of painterly techniques. This allows him to meet the challenge of making a new image by repeating the same structure with aplomb. Each painting is unique in mood and information despite Roberts’ self imposed repetition of shape, form, structure and color — yet success is really due to his deft brushwork and relentless attention to the drawing within the work. The paint application differs within each painting from carefully applied opaque layers to ones that evoke a brusque and provisional quality. This clash of high to low skill used in the same painting appears without any sense of cleverness, irony or nonchalance. Some canvases show evidence of a lot of rethinking, removing and re-painting contrasted with areas that the artist decided were perfect after the initial address, which expands the range of emotion and increases, at least to my mind, the notion of time in the work.

In these complex paintings, rich in complex spatial propositions, the main white and blue areas evoke Matissian plays of figure and ground, while within the smaller white or blue areas Roberts complicates foreground and background with shapes and lines that easily swap roles. Various marks and lines cut through and exit the box-like shapes. The light white areas contain orange and purple shapes, sinuous lines that can feel both comic and anthropomorphic. Occasional brownish-green shapes or strokes connote‘stuff’ tucked into interstitial spaces like closets, corridors or in-between walls. Each element is interconnected and dependent on other parts. Lines often toy or flirt with shapes, bisecting or breaking off, linking disparate areas, yet a strong sense of liberation and harmony is achieved. Perhaps Roberts has engaged these forms in this way to serve as an apt metaphor to describe the complexities of world we live in today.

The poetic title of the exhibition, “Paper Bed Concrete Head,” reverberates as sounds in the ear much in the way the forms and gestures in Roberts’ work themselves reappear and repeat in varied orientations and patterns. The enormous variety of lines, gestural marks, and organic and abstract forms spark associations with many modern art approaches and contemporary strategies: Roberts’ cobalt blues and vivid oranges bring de Kooning to mind, for instance.

An accomplished, mature artist long proven in the medium of oil paint, Roberts has undertaken something risky in this ambitious project. The results upend expectations of serial abstract painting.

The post Windows on a Complex World: Russell Roberts at Heskin Contemporary appeared first on artcritical.

November 13, 2014 to December 20, 2014
138 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th streets)
New York City, 212 750 0949

The title of Helen Miranda Wilson’s recent project room exhibition of eight small paintings at Lori Bookstein, “Kuba Cuneiform Quilts” is, like the works themselves, factual, neat, and informational. Until, that is, one spends a bit of time contemplating the works and their titles.

An initial view of the paintings reflects the noted sources — quilts, Kuba culture, cuneiform script — and yet very quickly an imaginative place between language and object is evoked. The surface of each panel has been prepared to a smooth and pristine pale-toned ground upon which the artists has skillfully painted hundreds of shapes often nestling and linking into each other. The scale — none of the works are much larger than a book cover — invites one to step in and explore a universe of multiple unique families of colored triangles and squares arranged within a small and shallow space. At first glance this can read as a kind of visual braille, but then, Wilson’s titles and colors, suggestive of particularities of atmosphere and environment, evoke many possible readings.

Titles like Lexicon, Snow, Old Friend, 5 O’clock, Light Garden, Little Dusky Darling and Mercato allude to familiar, quotidian things and register well with the color sensations and qualities of the painting they belong to. Snow, for example, employs a loose grid more than any of the others and reminds this viewer of an urban snowstorm where yellow lights in frigid inky darkness of night are softened by a veil of snow. Mercato’s colors link easily to flowers, fruits and even synthetic hues of mass-produced goods. These sink into a pale terra cotta ground in a space that appears shallower than the others bringing to mind pottery and crafts rather than the atmosphere or the place of a market. Teetering between description and statement, Treasure Land is both a proper name and an imperative, a place to go to and a plea. Light Garden as well, could be interpreted as light in a garden, a garden made of lights, or even a local name for Provincetown at night.

What is so remarkable about these works is how they are simultaneously unassuming and completely dense. And it is uncanny that such a broad range of experiences is conjured with the reduced language of triangles and squares.

With deliberate clustering of similar-hued groups of her triangles and squares the artist suggests movements and counter-movements as close valued hue-sets placed adjacent to each other vibrate and subtle shifts in value create very slow ripple effects. One merely needs to stop, step in and look. Wilson’s achievement is in presenting us — the viewers — with a new kind of space, one that despite the modest size of these images continually expands, both perceptually and referentially. This surely is the experience viewers want most: to be brought to a new space carved out specifically for the mind to explore.

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September 15 to October 21, 2011
19 East 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues,
New York City, (212) 794-0550

On Cape Cod there is a bay that faces directly into the setting sun during the summer months. When the tide is low one can count up to seventeen sandbars before seeing the water’s edge more than half of a mile off shore. It’s a mind-bogglingly seductive scene. As the sun sets, the water trapped in between the long thin bars begin to shimmer, glow and turn hot orange, red and magenta, ringed with opalescent greens and blues. The sand bars go from reddish dirty blond to deep eggplant. The shore is lined with a cast of locals and tourists, many sitting on the dunes or posing for snapshots. When the last bit of the sun dips below the horizon, a din of clapping and whoo-hooing is heard followed shortly by the irregular hum of engines starting up to take the spectators home.

But for Graham Nickson, this is the time when the colors are the most intense. He knows to stay and look. He knows also the challenge of such a moment and of such a theme.

In the aptly titled exhibition, Paths of the Sun, Nickson demonstrates his capture of the transitory in a forty-year sampling of over 40 bedazzling paintings and watercolors of sunrise and sunset.

There are examples of the small paintings in hand painted frames from 1972-74 made during time spent in Rome, when he initially adopted this time-worn theme and aimed at making a fresh interpretation of it.  These small format works articulate a certain conception of light and a synthesis of abstraction and figuration that resulted in images that Nickson to this day continues to explore. The gemlike quality of these small-format works is emphasized by the wide, flat, profiled frames, which also underscore the individuality of each image. They link, in my mind, to the experience of finding small treasures in dimly lit churches.

A group of watercolors, installed in a grid, conveys Nickson’s idea of painting the same tree as a foil to sunrises and sunsets. These are characterized by large, interlocking areas of brightly colored wash with hatched lines that become, bush, tree, branch and so on. They represent some of Nickson’s most extra sensory visions of the forces of nature upon his subject.  Each is an animated world of its own, recalling the watercolors of Charles Burchfield and the newest large-scale paintings of Per Kirkeby, to be seen a few blocks away at Michael Werner Gallery. A second group of figureless watercolor landscapes of sunrise or sunset mesmerize with pulsating orbs and bands of rich color.

But three monumental paintings anchor and at the same time steal the show.  They make me want for more, not because they are deficient in any way, but becuase they are so full of so much that is absent in a great deal of painting today.  A deep pleasure in viewing Nickson’s work is being able to discern the direct, straightforward use of the medium. To see the hand at work, to feel the effect of the choice of the oversized canvas, to be brought along as a viewer as if participating in the spectacle of this work: these are seldom achieved by anyone in today’s climate of immersive, overwhelming spectacle.

The theatricality of sharp contrasting colors of red, orange, pink, deep blue, gray and violet in Traveler; Red Sky (2002), as well as in Red Lightening (2008-10) creates powerful epic images.  Although these paintings produced a lingering emotional reaction, the most recent of the three, Tree of Birds (2009-11), is the most challenging for its seemingly effortless combination and arrangement of both representational and abstract elements.

The scene, a tree of birds before a massive volcano within a mountain chain, is painted in shades of blue, grey, and violet, off-set by areas of light yellows and greens. A patchwork of interlocking clouds fill the sky, drop in front of mountains and cast shadow shapes upon fields below. There is a funky-chunkiness to these slightly comic, awkward forms as well as a remarkable compression between the foreground, middle ground and background. Shapes belonging to the background are pulled to the front of the picture plane and vice versa. Clusters of pale color are geometrically deployed in subtle triangulation that interestingly brings emphasis to the volcano peak. Here, we find a small, white shape, just like the pale lavender one to its right, which, surprisingly, is a bird in flight and not a cloud. One can imagine being in this scene and yet the painting conveys the immensity and mystery that we know of and experience but can never fully capture.

The post Staring at the Sun: Graham Nickson at Knoedler & Company appeared first on artcritical.

16 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues,
New York City, (212) 288-8808

Since he graduated from Yale in 1986, Anthony Fisher has been painting still life and the human figure. His portraits actually have an element of still life about them, for while drawings are done from live models,  paintings are made from either casts taken from these models or from plaster busts. His newest series of monumental, seething and tragic portraits are among his strongest to date.

For his second solo show in New York, the Boston-based artist has included a range of drawings that allow for an expanded, behind the scenes view of the project. The five paintings of larger-than-life size heads are all centrally positioned frontal views, often in a neutral space. They are as much drawn as they are painted. Thickly layered paint is equally scraped off as painted on, with admixtures of colors that instantly link the work to notable predecessors such as Soutine, Giacometti, Picasso, and Bacon, as well as with such contemporary painters as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, John Walker, and Cecily Brown.

Some of the drawings are done simply in charcoal, others combine Conté crayon with pencil or ink pen with acrylic wash. Some, almost frugal in their treatment, are studies for the paintings, while others, such as ones of the artist’s mother, exude an elegiac wistfulness.  All are articulate working drawings. Unlike much contemporary drawing created through the accumulation of small, illustrative lines, as complete works rather than studies, Fisher’s fluid, gestural lines combine with wide side-of-the-crayon marks that instantly inflate the page, giving volume, mass and breath to the heads. Here we can follow the artist’s working hand and witness a searching mind probing the form while exploring the position, expression, and mood of the head. The drawings, which can stand on their own, are also referential to the paintings.

The representation of a specific individual dates back to Greek and Roman times. In the twentieth century, practical and social functions, along with likeness and a sense of reality, slowly gave way to more varied interpretations for painted portraits. However, as Erwin Panofsky noted, contemporary portraiture still “seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity.”   At first glance one might not feel they have much at all in common with Fisher’s isolated and intensely raw-appearing heads. Yet in short time, the eye begins to perceive traces drawn in—on or through the scraped underlayers—that flesh out these somewhat carrion-like heads. We begin to read Fisher’s entire process as a way to capture, through accumulation, an aspect of time, emotion and the feeling that some part of being human must always remain elusive.

Fisher’s paintings are meta-portraits inspired initially by a white plaster copy of a pivotal polychrome bust made in the fifteenth century by Donatello, from which he worked for nearly a year, simply to determine in paint the expression and position of the form. Eventually Fisher made a plaster cast of his own longtime model. After hundreds of drawings and dozens upon dozens of sessions with each of the canvases—always with a near compulsive adding on and wiping out process — Fisher built his response to the bust in front of him Like Giacometti, also an obsessive reworker of images, Fisher is fascinated with the ineffable mysteries and existential challenges of the human figure and psyche.  Several of his works are titled “Interior.”

Except for swaths of intense cerulean blue in some paintings, the color here is somber, harsh, and earthy. These are not fleshy paintings even though the paint is very, very juicy—especially on the faces, where it accumulates into confectionary-like moments of illusion. Fisher isn’t looking at flesh, but rather at plaster, while recalling the skin of his sitters and marble sculptures -both of which can have a particular earthly chill.

In returning day after day to the portrait underway, Fisher registers the minute differences of his own attitude, his own state of being. Through a determined and relentless pursuit of an ultimately impossible to seize reality, the work evokes much of the internal questioning that we all have in common. His deft manipulation of color, light, and space imbues these portraits with vivid sensations that yield a high degree of pictorial poetry. It’s a remarkable achievement considering these paintings begin as a response to a stark, inert plaster cast of a bust.

The post Captured Through Accumulation: The Reworked Portraits of Anthony Fisher appeared first on artcritical.

December 14, 2006 to February 3, 2007

traveling to the Wiegand Gallery of Notre Dame of Namur University
January 20 to March 3, 2008

What is it to exhibit the black and white works on paper of Melissa Meyer made between 1984 and 1994? What is it to momentarily gather and present this work apart from the current color-rich, exuberant, work that the artist is known for? And what are it to do so when these works were initially adjacent to but not the main body of work at that time? Among many possible answers, one is that in doing so, viewers are shown something akin to the back-story; the back-stage efforts, investigations and private discoveries that Meyer was engaged in. Some of these discoveries have been transformed and reappear in the current work.

These varied works show the many formal possibilities at Meyer’s disposal. It is tempting to try to identify parts of the language such as calligraphic lines and luminous scrims of paint that we see in her work to date and to anticipate which of those possibilities might resurface in future works. And we see that these discoveries have as much to do with form as they do with color.

Many of the works on view are drawings done in charcoal or oil stick on paper and read as exploratory efforts while some monumentally scaled pieces, made in oil or oil stick on paper, are robust statements. A range of compositions and image types signal the influence of past masters such as, Matisse, De Kooning, Pollock, yet ,each have information reflecting this artist’s searching and critical process that was underway at the time. The work registers influence or influence is noted but only in the way that is analogous, for example, to the way we think see a masked face in a cloud one second that shifts into a belly dancer the next. InUntitled, Triptych #2, 1988 and Triptych#2 VSC 1992, there is a familiarity to the high contrast, cut-out-like positive–negative interlocking forms, but as we follow the forms we discover the image resists being locked into simple association. It seems to change as we view it or is it we who change as we view it?

These works evolved as a secondary part of her practice. They were made concurrently with colorful paintings that she was developing for exhibitions at the time. Meyer has remarked, “After working in watercolor and oil, in the end I would do something in black and white to check the tonality and activity of the forms to see if they had strength.” In an untitled drawing in oil stick done in 1986, Meyer has brought several types of marks and speed to bear on the surface. A swoop of calligraphic line falls from the top left of the page and stops just short of a ghost-like, grayish vertical form that is partially covered by a solid black bug-like form made with thick, forceful strokes. In this piece one can see the antecedents of Meyers horizontal-vertical rhythm, positive-negative shape-making, decentered composition, calligraphic line and veils of color; characteristic elements of the artists work today. In this case the attitude and aim of Meyer’s abstraction seems to have more in common with her contemporary peer, Bill Jensen, than with those of earlier generations. In this drawing there is a range of force, variety of stroke, and ambiguity of scale which together hint at a notion of time, distance and continuity to suggests a view that is at once cosmic and microscopic.

The post Melissa Meyer in Black and White: Works on paper, 1984-1994 appeared first on artcritical.

Amid today’s unlimited range of styles and endless combinations of media competing for art world support,  one of the great innovations of early Western modernism, Abstract art, continues to garner attention, evolve, and in many cases deepen in the hands of some of its current practitioners. Such is the case of veteran abstract painter Pat Lipsky whose career spans three decades marked by explorations in both abstraction and representation, and as demonstrated by her most recent aptly titled exhibition” Color Paintings” she continues to advance the issues of her work.

The grid based format of the nine human scaled paintings in the exhibition is becoming a recognizable trademark structure for this artist, placing her in the company of such reductive, contemplative painters as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin. Five vertical columns of varying widths are sub-divided at midpoints that in cross section appear as ascending and descending steps, which dip down or rise up in the center. In most cases three narrower columns frame two wider central columns that contain her carefully arrived at, in-between, colors within the ten rectilinear blocks, or segments, created by the divisions. The symmetrically deployed colors allow for a myriad of associations such as landscapes viewed through a colonnade, renaissance facades, geometric patterns, ornamental motifs and blocky figures.

In “Proust’s Sea”, 2006, two central columns feature colors that recall sky and earth are framed by three columns of colors that recall earth and sea. Naming the blues, greens, umbers and teals become a fruitless exercise because those names are never adequate to describe how the colors behave in their arrangements. Subtle hue shifts occur within similarly colored segments . One is apt not to notice her mastery of color because it all seems just right. The blues, at once radiant and atmospheric are activated by the somber tones of browns and greens. Credit is due to the handling of her edges for the additional vitality of the work. One could journey quite far simply following the lines, spaces, smudges and blurs that separate the segments. The surfaces are delightfully polluted with traces of life, dust hairs, blobs of dried paint which underscores the fact that these are hand made paintings, and although they may make allusions to an ideal they are full of the irregularities and imperfections of life.

Kim Uchiyama and Barry Goldberg also make work that participates in a late modernist conversation, however, while Uchiyama explores the poles of expansion in her brightly colored banded abstractions, Goldberg mines the poles of reduction in his spare oil and encaustic canvases.

In her current exhibition titled “Strata”, Ms. Uchiyama’s landscape based abstractions come in a portrait format of stacked horizontal bands of colors. Muscular strokes of thick oil paint, in varying widths, span the surface and are interrupted by intervals of segmented color blocks. Her expressive paint handling brings to mind the built up surfaces and rough edged strokes of Sean Scully; however, the space she evokes is decidedly more referential. In  “Untitled “ 2006, saturated hues of red yellow and blue are tempered by occasional off whites and lighter blue hues. Thin lower bands of dark colors seem compressed by the weight, heat and vitality of wide red and yellow bands in the upper layers, serving as an apt metaphor for the effects of time upon landscapes and civilizations.

Barry Goldberg’s  paintings at first seem to be primarily about ground. However, in most of the works on view from 2006, a thin colored frame of buttery encaustic color superimposed upon a field of oil color.  This thin frame seems to delineate a figure within the field thus unsettling and in some cases reversing the reading of what is figure and what is ground.  “City Square in the Rain” 55 x 42inches, brings to mind the rounded shape of a subway car window. A two inch wide blue encaustic stripe circumnavigates the canvas; it’s position, an inch or so from the edge creates an outer frame of remaining olive green ground. Inside, an atmospheric grey blue area recalling a foggy, rain soaked window is streaked with occasional vertical lines, traces left by the sharp edge of the tool as it pulled successive layers of oil color down the surface. At once, alluding to rain as in the title, these hair like marks also describe with considerable clarity the process of how the work was made. The muted color grounds are often activated by the presence of the brightly colored encaustic frame. For example, in “Rysa Szpara” 2006, a scarlet-vermillion frame enhances the reddish identity of the brown field and adds warmth to the cool cream color of the top field.

These three diverse painters made me think of something Agnes Martin once said, “Anything can be painted without representation.”

The post Pat Lipsky at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Barry Goldberg at Howard Scott Gallery, Kim Uchiyama at Galleria Janet Kurnatowski appeared first on artcritical.