February 26 through April 4, 2015
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 755 2828

57th Street has seen its share of contemporary art galleries shrink to a mere handful in recent years. Significant among the still-flourishing few is the modestly sized Alexandre Gallery, tucked away on the 13th floor of the Fuller Building. This month Alexandre offers a roomful of small panels demonstrating Lois Dodd’s gift for visual epiphany and, in the small anteroom near the entrance, a pair of portraits facing each other on opposite walls by Maine artist Brett Bigbee. Though clearly distinct from one another, these two painters demonstrate the range and the vitality of perceptual painting, a branch of the artform imprudently sidelined by our major museums these days in favor of a tiresome abstraction. If you find yourself seeking relief from MoMA’s trend-groping “Forever Now,” this exhibition should be your first stop.

Dodd has been at her peak for so long now that her reputation is all but settled, waiting only for transfer from an oral history among fellow artists to a more secure documentation in New York’s art institutions of record. This current grouping includes variations on themes she has improvised on for decades: landscapes, windows, sunsets, moonrises and iconoclastic flower studies. Of particular interest is Reflected Light on Brick Wall, December (2014), consisting of a window’s sunlit outline projected on white brick, including the silhouette of a house plant apparently sitting on the window’s sill. What’s unusual here is a carefully penciled grid, revealing in uncharacteristically dense detail the outline of each brick — hundreds of them. This elaborate drawing is then set back by means of deftly painted transparent layers of subtle color contrasts, ultimately reducing the effect of the drawing to a minor yet essential role. A risky move in consideration of the minimal painterly style she is known for, it recalls Mondrian’s late but youthful experiments with colored masking tape. Perhaps self-challenge, not posturing is the better route to continued relevance.

In paint handling Bigbee could not be more different. One may be tempted to assert that his work follows in the tradition of Grant Wood, but there are so many other traditions that could be mentioned — French Neoclassicism, Late Gothic — almost any style that keeps a hard edge running along meticulously modelled shapes may be said to share an affinity with these two paintings. The presence of this distinct sensibility in any era — examples seem to crop up in most periods — calls for recognition that Bigbee, like his precursors, is his own man and that his work ought to be assessed on its own terms. For what distinguishes a Wood from an Ingres, or an Ingres from a Van Eyck, aside from obvious historical dissociation, is the sensibility that surfaces through each practitioner’s devotion to their shared sense of heightened illusion. Left, then, to compare the two paintings to each other, it should be noted that Bigbee completes a very small number of canvases each year. Each of his paintings is in some measure a world unto itself.

Of the two canvases in this exhibition, Josie Over Time (2011-15) and Maxine (2012-13), I found the latter more compelling, largely because it seems unfinished, or perhaps spontaneously aborted. By this I mean that in its current state, which may indeed be complete (one assumes so, as it represents exactly half the exhibition) it appears as if the artist saw something worth preserving and decided to leave it as is, a move that raises intriguing questions about spontaneity that would otherwise seem counterintuitive considering the fastidious labor this painting style requires.

The glow that emanates from the skin of the sitters in both pictures (as opposed to a glow projected on the skin, like most pictures) is a product of delicate construction, but in Maxine it seems to have been halted before the cool underpainting could be brought to a fuller and warmer tone. Unlike the finish of its counterpart, which includes a fully realized landscape, Maxine’s flat and darkened background only emphasizes the ephemeral fog of her presence. Her eyes outlined in a pronounced scarlet, as if painted in preparation for the warmer flesh tones to follow, appear in their current state slightly separate from her graying cheeks and forehead, as if some inner discomfort has freed itself from her body. This ghostly pallor is further heightened by the bright red garment strap that ends in a casual tie over her right shoulder, supporting the attitude implied in her ambiguous, if not slightly resentful, stare.

The preeminent aspect of this style of painting is evident in how each artist’s methods dissolve into their pictures’ carefully overlaid membranes, obliterating brush marks, erasing any traces of labor and refining color to flawless modulations that in a superficial reading end up creating either a mesmerizing realism or an unearthly hyperrealism. And yet a careful study of Bigbee’s work in this exhibition suggests that the range of emotion separating these two paintings, especially if compared with the variety of human representation by painters of similar sensibility over the centuries, indicate that there is more to it than categorical realism. These two pictures ought to encourage us to reassess our use of the word “expression” as synonymous with sweeping, slashing brushwork.

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October 2014: Ken Johnson, Joan Waltemath and Marjorie Welish joined moderator David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read, Peter Fend at Essex Street, David Hockney at Pace Gallery and John Walker at Alexandre Gallery.  The panel took place at the National Academy Museum.  Video by Anna Shukeylo.  Recording Engineer: Isaac Derfel.

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October 2 to November 15, 2014
41 East 57th Street (corner Madison Avenue)
New York City, 212-755-2828

Few painters have expanded the original impulses of Abstract Expressionism in more directions than John Walker. During the course of his half-century of painting, he has incorporated into his canvases written poetry verses, concise renderings of skulls and allusions to both aboriginal art and the old masters. He has pushed painting’s material limits, employing shaped canvases and large-scale collage techniques, and mixing all manner of ingredients into his paint: gels, chalk dust, and more recently, mud. But his biggest departure from “classic Ab-Ex” may be his reliance on the perceived world. Although moodily abstracted, his images from the last decades have been consistently inspired by observations of the real. His urgent strokes and brooding color, moreover, reveal a certain discipline of form; their forces build in ways that create discrete, tangible presences in his paintings – a feat of internal composition that hints as much of European modernism as the New York School. If the artist is an Abstract Expressionist, he’s an unusually worldly one.

For more than a decade, Walker has investigated a particular slice of the observed:  the view from his studio in Seal Point, Maine.  From the foot of a cove it overlooks a dramatic panorama, with fingers of land cutting across the vast meeting of water and sky. The tides, which alternately cover and expose wide mud flats, add to the shifting effects of light, time and weather. This disequilibrium seems to suit Walker, who says he chooses to work in the least scenic spot, one strewn with washed-in garbage. Even so, his recent paintings at Alexandre Gallery suggest the artist has reached, career-wise, a kind of personal equilibrium. The palette for his large canvases has become lighter, and their compositions more lucid. Gone are some of the more extravagant forays, including the skulls and written texts – the mud remains – as if the broad spaces and limpid light were sufficient fuel for his painting. The work at Alexandre falls mostly into two categories: six- or seven-foot tall canvases, and paintings on discarded bingo cards just over seven inches high.  All are vertical in format and boast a high horizon above a spreading plane of water/earth.

Most of the large canvases are divided into contrasting planes of parallel, sometimes zigzagging, lines. Often they include one or two realistic tokens of the actual scene: an island covered with trees, the small circle of a sun or moon. These paintings manage to convey nature’s immensity even as they mangle its topography. In “The Sea No. II” (2014), for instance, a large, white shield-like shape, articulated by vertical green stripes, hangs before horizontally striped deep blues. The energy of the forms is clear, even if their perspectival relationships aren’t; it represents a point of land intruding weightily upon the water’s spreading surface. At the top, a red sun tips into an unlikely indentation in the horizon. A sprouting of greens interrupts the blue halfway up the canvas. The lower half of the shield-form has the rough texture of mixed-in earth, grounding it metaphorically. But the metaphor isn’t really necessary: one senses land against shimmering expanse, the remoteness of sun and sky, and the isolation of a tree-covered island. One absorbs the usual paradox of painting, of material representations of the immaterial. But one experiences something else, as well – a representation made especially vital through abstract means.

Other large canvases introduce different elements. A snowfall of white or beige patches descends through three canvases; in another, tentacle-like arms stream across blue of water. At times the artist’s generalizing or repetition of forms suggests a “problem-solving” approach – the studious application of a workset of ideas. But this hardly diminishes their overall power, and the small paintings on bingo cards – over a dozen of which line one wall – are a delight.  All of these tiny works size up broad scenes with startling immediacy. Walker’s marks dash about and dot their surfaces in a frenzy, in a wider array of colors – emerald blue-greens, grass-greens, blazing oranges and subtler reds in some, ochres and browns in others – as well as freer and more profuse detail.  A thickly brushed, rather obtuse white form dominates most of the images, angling tensely across the ground’s receding horizontals. In some, a cluster of greens becomes, palpably, a tree rooted at a specific distance; in others, a sprinkling of dots could be tiny figures on an immense plain. A minority of the marks are recognizable as objects, but all read as presences in the almost mystically deep and bright spaces. Though painted on humblest of supports, the colors and forms capture the primal experience of land meeting sky, and the artist seems to experience it anew each time.

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January 23 to March 1, 2014
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
(The Fuller Building, 13th Floor)
New York City, 212-755-2828

Something mysterious happens when a painter commits impressions of nature to canvas. Even though the act of painting involves reductions—simplifications of form, omissions of detail—expressiveness is liable to expand. For an artist liberated by this re-ordering (and the best are), a richness of vision supplants the sheer plenitude of nature. Lois Dodd is clearly such an artist, and her latest paintings at Alexandre shows that even after six decades of exhibiting she hasn’t missed a step.

The thirty, mostly small paintings of houses, landscapes and flowers reflect her familiar, idiosyncratic outlook: the probing, often mischievous curiosity about the appearance of ordinary objects, and the peculiarities of translating them to a flat surface. As always, Dodd hides none of her process, rendering masses in broad planes that serve as foils for agile, darting detail.

In March Snow (2013), the artist captures the minimalist scene of a neighbor’s dormer window—glimpsed, apparently, from her own second-story window—with confident color and an appealing lack of decorum. The pale, dense yellow of the facade gives way to a slightly more neutral—but somehow vastly open—yellow of sky. Nature elaborates on this pas de deux, and Dodd relates: scraggly branches reach upwards beyond the house, while snowflakes filter downwards in the space between it and our point of view. Red Shirt and Window (2013) relishes the sight of a clothesline-suspended shirt, scrawny but exuberant, against the great, mounding arc of a bush.

Riddles of details punctuate the unfolding prose of Window with Amaryllis Plant (2012). A slender, green stalk winds sinuously in front of a house’s austere verticals. A conversation circulates between a window sash lock, the house’s chimney, and a twist of yellow-green in the flowerpot—all equal in dimensions on the surface, but thoroughly apart in space.

The exhibition includes nearly a dozen close-up paintings of flowers —floral portraits, really. In some of these, an evenness of color imparts a handsome, if not particularly urgent, graphic effect. More compelling is Bishop’s Children & Monarch Butterfly (2007), in which the variety and density of color impart a dramatic depth; the uppermost blossom hovers with vivacious breadth.

In fact, it’s the paintings with the densest designs and colors that reward the most. These include Foxglove and Wheelbarrow (2006), in which broad swathes of green—of various temperatures, and lightened in places by thinned brushstrokes—silhouette a wheelbarrow’s crisp, shadowed forms. It holds midway between a foreground blossom—close enough to touch—and a sky that hangs distantly despite its patchy texture of steely grays. In Barn and Bean Vines (2013), a far-away building, resting among small eruptions of trees, is dominated by the fantastically sculpturesque column of a bean vine in the foreground. With these paintings, Dodd is in her element, shaping complex rhythms with playful ease. They exude an affection for nature that never resorts to sentiment, and an occasional archness that never descends to the merely coy.

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October 17 to November 23, 2013
Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street, 13th Floor
at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

Is it possible to unironically depict nature in the twenty-first century? We allow Odilon Redon (1840-1916) his lavish Symbolist visions. And we esteem August Strindberg (1849-1912) for his painterly proto-abstract landscapes. And of course we greatly admire Arshile Gorky’s (1904-1948) nature-based late paintings. But in our visual culture, where the activity of painting has become so problematic, what place is there for Gregory Amenoff’s art? The best answer to this question, I think, is that Amenoff’s nature is not the mountains, rivers and seas of the nineteenth-century Romantics; nor the nature of Redon or Strindberg: but, rather, nature as a springboard for autonomous painting that relies upon figurative associations. Take Kronos II (2012-13), for example, with its abstract-looking biomorphic blue, green and purple forms. Or look at the stunning Lament  (2012-13), my favorite painting in the show, which offers a view, as if through a window, onto a field of mysterious forms, sunlit sky and shrubbery, done in colors straight from Pierre Bonnard. Then consider, also Ember (2013), in which a blue-violet vortex opens into a dark interior, in which rectangular forms float. And observe closely, finally, The Wish (2012-13) where the curved window, which opens onto a bright sunny sky, is surrounded by delicate greens. (I don’t understand the titles, by the way.  For me, they don’t aid analysis.) The colored pencil drawings provide a generous selection of Amenoff’s motifs, but because they appear, too often, to be images of Surrealistic natural motifs, the paintings, which more elaborately transform his subjects, are much more successful.

Amenoff’s subjects are varied, and they are difficult to identify, and often, a little difficult to describe. Painting on the scale of Abstract Expressionism, he depicts nature as if from very close up, showing intensely lit microscopic forms. His pictures have some affinities with the early paintings of Bill Jensen, which are smaller, and the scenes done from nature by Michael Kessler, another artist who came to prominence in the 1980s. But here Amenoff has found and dramatically developed a style all of his own. Painters who work with close attention to nature are often said to be visionaries. If your chosen subjects are cityscapes, then it is said that you are a realist, perhaps even a materialist; but if you focus on skies and trees, then, it is assumed you are in search of transcendental revelations. Such, at least is the bias of we city-dwellers, who visit the country only on weekends and on holiday. If you seek to understand Amenoff’s paintings, this way of thinking is limiting. That nature offers him marvelous resources doesn’t make his paintings images of sacred themes. Pageant, (2013) with its flowering orange forms set above a delicately painted field of stalks, is exhilarating.  But you don’t have to be seeking a religious vision to greatly admire this painting. The fascination of our visual world as depicted by Amenoff is self-evident.

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October 20 – December 17, 2011
41 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

The discrepancy between technique and expression is one of the fascinating paradoxes of art. Who would think that Ingres’ corseted technique could lead to such expansive descriptions? (Or, that Seurat’s careful building of tones would culminate in such gutsy massings of form, or Soutine’s thrashings—which stylistically seem to say, “Take me anywhere but here”—bring his subjects closer to the viewer?) Ingres’ obsessive details and distortions are an entertaining symptom of his loving Raphael not wisely but too well, and we may find ourselves in the peculiar position of admiring him despite his intentions.

Like Ingres, Brett Bigbee brings formidable rendering skills to idiosyncratic figure paintings. Nearly 20 drawings and paintings by the artist, who was born in 1954, recently graced the walls at Alexandre Gallery. Producing only one or two paintings a year, the artist has perfected a singular style that seems to combine the iconic reserve of American colonial portraiture and the descriptive effulgence of French academic painting. His precise modeling imparts to his figure and still life paintings both a glowing intricacy and a slightly surreal exactitude. Bigbee’s attentions are actually quite selective: he invariably renders reflections on the irises of eyes, but no eyelashes to speak of; their whites always include that tiny fold of flesh at the inner corner, but nary a vein. One might expect to find a vulnerability in his portraits, given his painstaking method and the fact that all are members his family, but, if anything, they seem inoculated by their brilliant rendering. They have a porcelain opacity that triggers, for me, an “Ingres reflex”: an admiration for the work at odds with its intentions.

The forms in the seven graphite drawings in the exhibition feel as much incised as drawn. In several portraits, the exquisite detail—the finely cracked lips, the darkly opalescent pools of eyes—impart an Ingres-like effect of self-generated organisms. Study for James (2000) is typical in that all forms become more diffuse as one proceeds away from the riveting eyes, until one arrives at a uniform tone at the sheet’s perimeter, the hair melting into an enclosing vapor. In this respect, Bigbee’s approach is distinctly unclassical; great traditional artists such as Ingres would locate a necessary role for each element, from encircling jawline to embellishments of hair, in characterizing the whole of a face.

Like George Tooker or William Bailey, Bigbee appears to approach drawing as an additive modeling process. Neighboring adjustments of tone actively create sensations of volumes, which accrue, in rather passive rhythms, to fill the surface. Opposite to this “from-the-inside-out” approach is the “outside-in” process of Matisse or Ingres, who, though fully capable of shading, start by locating and relating points across the paper, and building through the tensions of intervals. This is an approach based in composing, and it makes for different expression: the singularity of an arm extending through space as opposed to forms emerging evocatively from the depths. (In truth, great artists from Watteau to Degas had a foot in both camps, pacing their rich, modeled tones with vigorous intervals. But I’ll admit I’m keener on outside-in composing. Modeling without composing takes you to light-weight seductions—to Greuze and Bougereau—while composing without any tonal modeling at all can take you to such extraordinary places as Picasso’s line drawings or Rembrandt’s pen-and-ink sketches.)

Consequently Bigbee’s drawing is indeed muscular in its modeling, but not in the quantifying of human gesture. His infinitely patient approach to all parts of bodies produces some intriguing effects. For instance, the younger boy’s head and left arm pop out disconcertingly in the five-foot-tall drawing Joe and James (2001-2003), while both bodies seem to drop from the heads, rather than grow from the support of earth, imparting to them something of the aspect of pinned specimens.

But might this be the result of a conscious decision? Consider the small, remarkable drawing titled Abby (2004) Here, the slight pursing of lips, the shading about the eye sockets, and shadows about the base of the nose, eloquently lead from one to the other as asymmetrical pressures, all within the tangible embrace of a head. Honoring the mobility of features, the artist turns the subject’s eyes, wondrously, into the summation of a vulnerable entity.

In fact, lingering a while in the exhibition at Alexandre, one may sense in many of the works a particular kind of magic.  Academic artists are frequently strong, if conventional, draftsmen and less than active colorists. Their hues tend to fill rather than direct, adding simply an evocative sheen to what’s already there. Bigbee, however, appears to be the rare painter whose expression is more coherently expansive in color than in drawing. Indeed, his color sometimes weights elements left at loose ends by his iron-willed drawing.

In James (1999-2001), a portrait of a mother and her baby, the face of the baby is a marvel of modeling, and not just tonally, but with colors eliciting the movement between lit and softly shadowed areas. It represents what must be an extraordinary amount of work, yet it feels limber. Bigbee deftly catches even the curiosity in the baby’s gaze. Colors lend tangible weight to certain other sequences, too: there’s a luxurious depth in the movements between the baby’s shadowed ear, the deep absorbent red of his mother’s dress, and the pure blue of sky visible in the window—all coexisting within an inch of canvas space.  But such are the peculiarities of Bigbee’s attack that the entire remainders of the figures’ bodies have less sculptural presence. One recognizes strategies in the drawing; the baby’s curling fingers just broach the encompassing contour of his mother’s shoulder, while his other hand, resting atop her wrist, launches the larger echo of her fingers. But the drawing fails to build to such affecting events, and in this case even Bigbee’s empathetic color can’t enliven them rhythmically.

The exhibition includes five still life paintings, and here Bigbee’s precise descriptions avoid of the surreal overtones of some of the figural work. He also brings to them the stronger aspects of the portrait paintings, with simpler compositions again showing more momentum of rhythm. The six fruit in Quince (2000-01) vividly capture the orbiting energy of orange spheres in a leafy world. Dark Earth (2010-11) catches the singularity of a bright clover blossom arcing from a darkened patch of soil; behind it, the division of a glowing rock, by two blades of grass, sounds a telling response.

Dominating the exhibition, however, is Abby (2005-10), a portrait of young girl standing alone in a field. One imagines that Bigbee summoned his full powers for this six-foot-tall canvas, and in technical terms it’s a tour de force. Yet it impresses also as pictorial expression. Bigbee’s colors impart to the figure a palpable presence, as if she had precipitated out the scene’s thick, darkish air. Though the face and hands still flirt with that porcelain inertia, her vertical form holds powerfully in space against the taut horizontals of distant water and the rocks at her feet. Far-away treetops connect in an uneven wave that buoys the pale shoulders of the girl, who stands awkwardly, as if she wasn’t quite sure how she got there. The artist clearly knows, though—at least on some intuitive level—having conjured it through some remarkable chemistry of color.

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Robert Storr, Sarah Valdez, and Joan Waltemath joined David Cohen to discuss Lois Dodd at Alexandre Gallery, Ellen Phelan at Gasser Grunert Gallery, Laurie Simmons at Salon 94, and Krzysztof Wodiczko at Galerie Lelong.

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Ben Davis, Lance Esplund, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Tara Donovan at the Met, Anne Harris at Alexandre, Bharti Kher at Jack Shainman, David Reed at Max Protetch, and Zhang Huan at the Asia Society.

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May 13 to June 23, 2006

Relationships between the individual and and the communal component of artistic achievement bedevil every generation. T.S. Eliot insisted that every innovation gestates in an affinity with indispensable predecessors. Robert Musil declared that ·”·it is only meaningful to speak of originality where there is a tradition.·”· Unmoored from the reciprocity of similar sensibilities, there is only idiosyncrasy and caprice. Much as we love the romance of radical breaks, modernism itself evolved from roots in previous tendencies.

The innovations of Arthur Dove (1880 -1946) are inconceivable without Cezanne, Kandinsky, Matisse, or Picasso and, especially, Picabia. A valued member of the Steiglitz circle, he was in close sympathy with Georgia O·’·Keefe and the American painters who clustered around 291. Yet out of creative affinity with the work of other modernists, came a distinctive achievement that makes it possible to call Dove an American original. And a national treasure.

This exhibition displays a comprehensive gathering of Dove·’·s watercolors, produced in the last decade and a half of his life. It includes sketchbook pages and a select group to works from the Dove estate never before exhibited. These radiant little works (most 5 x 7 inches, later ones 3 x 4 or 3 x 5 inches) distill his move toward abstraction while continuing to suggest organic forms and the diurnal brightness of the natural world.

Dove began his career as an artist around 1903, the year he graduated. from Cornell, where he had studied law. He moved to New York determined to become an artist instead. Soon his work was appearing in mass-circulation magazines and he was dining at Mouquin·’·s, a Gilded Age restaurant popular with John Sloan and others of ·”·the Eight.·”· He married and, after four years as an illustrator, left for Paris.

He joined the cadre of Americans in Paris where he made friends with Alfred Maurer, a frequent visitor to Gertrude Stein·’·s salon, and exhibited in the Salon d·’·Automne of 1908. He and Maurer went on sketching trips outside the city, often to Cagnes, in the south. Dove was a rural modernist, closer in spirit to Cezanne than the urbanites who were his friends. The earth·-·its tones, distances and undulations·-·provided impetus to paint.

Back the States by 1909, he moved to Westport and bought a chicken farm to support his family. The labor was grueling; his marriage collapsed under the strain. In 1921, he moved into a houseboat moored off Manhattan with his companion·-·later, second wife·-·the painter Helen Torr. The pair eventually settled on the North Fork where he continued to raise his own food, a precarious livelihood supplemented with stipends from Steiglitz and, later, Duncan Phillips.

Dove did not commit himself to watercolor until 1930. Its translucent liquidity suited his need for what he called ·”·a means of expression which did not depend upon representation. . . [but was] nearer to the music of the eye.·”· The crystalline light of water color well-handled evoked what he referred to as ·”·sensations of light from within and without.·”· He took readily to the medium, producing one or two a day.

“Sunrise” (1937) and “Clamshell,” both beautifully elliptical and spare in drawing, typify the process of simplification in which medium and color became the essence of his imagery. Unconstrained by the conventions of landscape painting, “Wooded Pond”(1935) summarizes Dove’s characteristic tension between empathy with the natural world and a bent toward full abstrac tion. The fluidity of the paint and the speed of the brush dabbing wet-in-wet suggest a locale – a broken downward stroke for a tree, a single horizontal one for the water’s edge – without depicting it. Its subject is the fugitive mood of the place, a turbulent metaphor for the inner life of the artist observing it.

The jagged spiral of “Willow Tree” (1938) lets the pale green and white of the willow’s downy leaves stand for the tree itself.The first American to produce an uncompromisingly abstract painting as early as 1910-11, Dove earned Duncan Phillips’s proclamation that he was “the boldest American pioneer.”

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GWEN HARDIE: FACE PAINTINGS 2005
Dinter Fine Art until December 23 (547 W. 27th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-947-2818).

RICHARD WALKER: BEACON ROAD PAINTINGS
Alexandre Gallery until December 30 (41 E. 57th Street, 13th floor, at Madison Avenue, 212-755-2828).

(only Hardie and Harvey sections appeared in print)

Stephen Harvey’s eye is as acrobatic as his lithe models. In elaborately choreographed studio setups, he has nude female figures spread-eagled, tipped, and splayed on lushly animated sheets. Stridently lit, they cavort wildly with their own reflections. When, at times, they seem to fly across the canvas, viewers are left to deduce that the bodies in view are mirror images.

The mirror has been crucial to Mr. Harvey’s work for many years, but it is no longer a visible prop. This makes the suspended limbs in these paintings all the more startling — they throw the viewer into a pleasingly vertiginous, ambiguous space recalling a Tiepolo ceiling. And it is not just the artist’s perspective that has taken a gymnastic turn. The models have given up on the decorous poses familiar in Mr. Harvey’s earlier work, opting instead for corporeally expressive extremes: They lunge where they were once content to lounge.

Smooth flesh and crumpled sheets make for a highly sexed atmosphere, yet a chaste air pervades Mr. Harvey’s show at the intimate Gallery Schlesinger. Apollo, rather than Dionysius, is the presiding deity at what is more of an Olympiad than an orgy. The games these pictures play have to do with perception — nudity and athleticism are a strictly cerebral tease.

Mr. Harvey’s art has evolved within the strictly circumscribed genre of the studio nude. These latest works are unprecedented in his oeuvre in terms of scale, verve, and focus. His palette is a long way from the lugubrious monochrome of his 1990s blue period; he has also shed the almost filigree-like black outlines that used to make his paintings seem like colored-in drawings. The color is now a big-time player in the form of garish crimson, purple, even turquoise sheets against sumptuous glistening flesh.

The paint is swift and fluent in delivery, although there is no attempt to match the expressivity of the poses with painterly gusto or flourishes. Mr. Harvey is an obdurately flat painter, and insists on a democracy of treatment across the pictorial plane. (The exceptions occur in the small, deliciously impastoed untitled canvases.) He does, however, concede, in painterly terms, some differentiation between actual and reflected flesh. In “Nalu” (2005), the curves of a crouching, wisp-waisted model are accentuated almost to the point of chiarascuro; in contrast, there is a subtle dulling of tone and thinning of brush for her mirror-view rear.

Where the big early influence on Mr. Harvey was Paul Georges’s dramatized sense of the studio as locus of voluptuous self-discovery, the new work looks elsewhere. Here are elements of the tightly coded mannerism of Philip Pearlstein and the existential contortionism of Lucian Freud, but unlike these stalwarts of the studio nude, Mr. Harvey demands a degree of balletic dynamism from the model.

Only in two canvases — “Curvatura” and “Halawa I” (both 2004) — is the artist’s presence overt; a pair of feet and a hand, respectively, are spotted on the periphery of these compositions. Otherwise, he is the absent presence for whose benefit the challenging, suggestive poses are struck. Often, narcissistically, the model stares at her reflected self. Sometimes, she is so close to the mirror that her actual and reflected self conjoin, visually, as a single, extended body. In “Curvatura,” there is a disconcerting moment where the reflected head meets a mass of black hair atop the actual body, making her look like a Hans Bellmer doll with the head twisted out of shape.

But the intention doesn’t come across as willfully perverse (at least in the erotic sense). Mr. Harvey’s mannerism makes anatomical sense once you manage to place the figure in real space. He remains a lover of drastic, almost sadistic cropping, but sometimes, as in “Halawa I,” the edge of the canvas has a solidifying force, as if the backward-lolling figure were finding support from the pictorial frame. Rather than ends in themselves, Mr. Harvey’s extreme, forced poses are at the service of perception, forcing painter and viewer alike to confront limbs free of conventional associations and comfortable, gravity-bound familiarity.

Gwen Hardie shares radical cropping and defamiliarization with Mr. Harvey, but her painting occupies a very different place in terms of sensibility and ethic. The Scots artist, who relocated to New York recently, achieved a significant reputation in the U.K. with her ethereal, near-abstract figurative paintings that cited psychoanalysis and Buddhism in their explorations of the self. In recent years, she had exhibited abstract paintings with subtle trompe-l’oeil effects, in which it seemed as if a pointed object were pushing into the back of the canvas to suggest a point where planes diverge. The body is back in her third New York solo show — her first at Dinter Fine Art — though near-abstraction remains the order of the day.

Ms. Hardie’s sumptuously austere selection of three “Face Paintings” blow up isolated, less than obvious intersections of facial features to create an oxymoronic state of intimacy and alienation. “Face 03.24.05” (2005) presents a facial segment from upper lip to nasal tip in a 6-foot-square canvas. Looking at this enigmatic, out of focus image I couldn’t help thinking of Sargent’s portrait of Madame X, misreading the black shadow of nostrils at the top corners of the composition as negative space around shoulders and neck, the lip as the red satin bodice, the crevasse as breasts. The other two canvases are more straightforwardly realistic and legible, and to my eye less interesting, although “Face 11.23.04” which shows the eyes, nose, and brow of the artist, evidently squinting in self-regard, is a serene painterly delight.

The debut New York show of Ms. Hardie’s fellow Scot, Richard Walker, is currently on view at Alexandre Gallery. It is a gem. Mr. Walker recently held a residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Conn. In the months he was there, it seems, he developed an American painting accent. His small, evidently plein-air responses to wintry woods, painted in a deft, fresh hand on masonite, strongly recall Lois Dodd (which is no doubt what alerted him to Mr. Alexandre), Edwin Dickinson, and Alex Katz.

Mr. Walker is known in the U.K. for focused, understated, sparse interiors that recall Hammershøi, Corot, and Menzel, but the new landscapes look to be swifter in both observation and execution. The painter’s loosening up has entailed some bravura touches—joyously spontaneous scumbling, sgraffito, and painterly splurges — without diminishing his calm, thoughtful perceptual acuity.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 8, 2005

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