Leah Durner is an action painter in the sense that we are constantly aware in her work of a primal moment, a coming into being. Looseness to the point of teetering on the edge of chaos is omnipresent, often trumping resolve. She is as much the heir of Jackson Pollock, with his ecstatic disengagement from representation, his submission, or oneness, with an inner, balletic grace, as she is with the corporeal, carnal Willem de Kooning.
Durner’s squiggy, succulent paintings – oil on canvas, on paper, and poured enamel on board – add voluptuous nuance to the phrase “brushstroke.” She populates her work with writhing and fluttering forms that are, at once, like limbs and veils. This conflation of the sartorial and the anatomical might recall that sly, intense gem of a poem by Robert Herrick, “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” with its evocations of “liquefaction” and “vibrations”. And apropos couture, her palette. though intuitive, also derives from fashion observations. Without so much as a hint of postmodern irony, the body of work from the mid-aughts selected for display in her first show with Loretta Howard gallery famously derived its jolie-laid dissonant palette from Miuccia Prada collections. DAVID COHEN (2006)
Leah Durner, Prada Spring 1996, 2006, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 66 inches. Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery
Leah Durner Paintings: 2002-2006, at Loretta Howard Gallery, July 12 to August 3, 2012. 525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues. New York City, 212-695-0164
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