While the inclusion for the first time in her career of photography and drawing – juxtaposed within the same, sometimes large scale works – marks a radical departure for Denise Green, the veteran New York-based Australian painter has spent the best part of her career probing issues of memory, representation and the visual sign, so the move doesn’t come completely from left field. In fact, seen within the perspective of her involvement with the influential Theory journal, Semiotext(e) and the significant impact of her work in the Whitney’s 1979 exhibition, New Image Painting, this gesture almost seems inevitable. Except that between these theory-oriented beginnings and her more recent painterly achievements Green’s work evolved along highly subjective, often symbolist pathways that relieve her latest explorations of support of any kind of dry reductivism. In fact, abstract drawn marks segue to diffused photographic representations with elegance and ease, with a poetic logic. DAVID COHEN
Denise Green: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs on view through February 21 at 547 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212-677-452
Denise Green, Saar Elegy: Loop, 2014. Three works on paper, one photograph, 29.5 x 74 inches total. Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery
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