A question for arcritical readers: Has a married couple ever had overlapping, solo exhibitions at separate galleries in Manhattan? Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens couldn’t think of one, and nor could I. If their case is indeed unique, then her exhibition at Gary Snyder Project Space and his at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which overlap for nine days, is an item for the record books. Adding a delicious romantic twists is the fact that the overlap includes Valentine’s Day.

The two were wed in 1981 and they share a painting studio in a barn in upstate New York. There is also discussion of renovating a room in their Tribeca apartment so that she can work on her drawings and he on his collages while they’re in the city. “Actually, ‘renovating’ is too strong a word,” says Plagens. ‘Ridding of junk’ would be more accurate.” Both of them have had storied independent careers. He was art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has shown with Hoffman since 1974. She is a professor at Hofstra University, writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and was recently the subject of a two-decade career overview at Scripps College in Claremont, California that will travel to the University of Montana in March.

They bring disparate sensibilities to their painting practices. Plagens’ work – with its gestural application and improvisatory attitude – has roots in Abstract Expressionism. The abrasions in his paint surfaces are signs of happy accident and copious correction.   He resolves his disorderly backgrounds by laying geometric elements on top of them. Multicolored polygons, dubbed “badges” by Nancy Hoffman, take on the role of Hans Hofmann’s structure-imposing rectangles.

Fendrich’s work, while no less improvised, builds more slowly, in a manner recalling Cubists like Juan Gris and California hard-edge painters like Frederick Hammersley. Using oils, she glazes her surfaces into a reproduction-defying shimmer, while enclosing her geometric shapes with a painted line that takes its soft, textured character from hard pastels. The day after viewing the 1993 Seurat exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum she went out and bought a box of Conté crayons. Her drawings, also on view at Gary Snyder,are constructed in the same careful manner, resulting in a smoldering intensity.

“Laurie is the optimist who keeps Jane Austen novels and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by her bedside,” explains Plagens. “I’m the card-carrying existentialist who thinks that the universe is held together with chewing gum and baling wire and could fall apart at any moment. My paintings reflect that sense of barely contained order. Hers assume more order from the beginning.”

But having worked alongside one another for many years, some inevitable exchange has occurred, suggesting a productive if subtle collaboration. Plagens’s works show increasing decision and clarity between 2007 and 2010, while Fendrich’s grow in contrast and whimsy. “Laurie’s paintings may have become a little more playful over the years as a consequence of my work having been around the studio,” says Plagens. Fendrich adds, “I may have prompted him to clean up his act a little bit.” But they don’t offer each other unsolicited critiques. Creative support takes the form instead of an occasional shoulder rub.

Are there any problems with sharing a studio?

“Only the music, sometimes,” says Plagens. “Laurie can listen to anything except rock ‘n roll. I can listen to anything except, well…”

“Regina Spektor, for instance,” she finishes. “I like girl music.”

“She’ll also put her iPod on the dock and set one song to play on repeat. She’ll start working, and I’ll come back into the studio a couple of hours later and the same song is still playing. I get myself out of there.”

They laugh, as they often do.

Peter Plagens: I Don’t Give a Damn/Every Moment Counts, at Nancy Hoffman Gallery
January 20 – February 19, 2011.  520 West 27 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 966-6676

Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings, at Gary Snyder Project Space.
February 10 – April 2, 2011. 250 West 26 Street, between 7th and 8th avenues.  New York City, (212) 929-1351

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Long considered one of the innovators of photorealism, Audrey Flack emerged on the scene in the late 1960s with paintings that embraced magazine reproductions of movie stars along with Matza cracker boxes and other mundane objects, that referred ironically to Pop Art. As one of the first of these artists to enter the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Flack later came to excel in vanitas paintings that combined painted renderings of black and white photographs along with detailed arrangements of elegant objects including fruits, cakes, chocolates, strings of pearls, lipsticks, tubes of paint, and glass wine goblets.  In works such as Wheel of Fortune (1977-78), she would represent decks of playing cards and other ephemera related to gambling, adding a mirror and human skull, for good measure.  Her recent exhibition of Cibachrome prints, curated by Garth Greenan for Gary Snyder Project Space, is titled “Audrey Flack Paints A Picture” and is accompanied by five actual paintings.  This show reveals the painstaking process employed in making these fresh and original paintings from the late 1970s through the early 1980s during a highly significant and intensely productive period of her career.

( Gary Snyder Project Space, September 16 – November 6, 2010 )

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For the last century and a half, modern painters have striven (through instinct rather than conviction) to create works with rewards for the eye which a camera cannot convey or match. John Griefen carries the process to a new extreme with monochromatic paintings whose rich, subtly textured surfaces are fiendishly difficult to reproduce.  To get their full impact, with their many voluptuous colors, sizes, shapes and distinctive surface, one really needs to see the original works.

Gary Snyder, who is displaying them, perceives analogies between these paintings and the nearly monochromatic black paintings of Ad Reinhardt from the 1950s.  Other observers may be reminded of reductive painters of the 1960s, like Jo Baer or Darby Bannard, but Griefen’s art is conceived differently and has arrived more recently at a uniquely twenty-first century image.  Reinhardt’s monochromes, with their latent checkerboard patterns, were developed through simplifying the geometric abstractions that he was painting in the 1940s and exhibiting with the American Abstract Artists. The “post-painterly” generation who came of age in the19‘60s were rebelling against the loose, expressionist brushwork of Willem de Kooning, and second-generation Abstract Expressionists like Michael Goldberg and Alfred Leslie. Griefen’s art has gone through a more complex evolution than Reinhardt’s without resorting to the revolutionof minimal art. The painter who stands closest to Griefen on his artistic family tree is Jules Olitski.  Some of Olitski’s admirers are taken aback by Griefen’s painstakingly-achieved ultra-simplicity, but in truth these new paintings incorporate Olitski’s concern with surface, gently but firmly structured into a new synthesis.

In 1998 I  included a painting by Griefen in a group show I curated for the Tribes Gallery.  That painting, while lovely, was still in Olitski’s orbit, with subdued colors and loose, free sweeps of paint. In the next six years, Griefen gradually evolved into his current idiom. It was first displayed at the Salander-O’Reilly gallery in 2004, though only in a somewhat limited range of pictures, similarly shaped and much the same size.  More recently, Griefen’s way of making such paintings has become increasingly sophisticated. Though none of them bear any titles, each picture must be different, and each color that he chooses must be matched to its own individual shape, color and size.  In the current show, one wall pairs a large, muscular deep purple vertical composition with a gracefully long, narrow, horizontal canvas of palest mauve. Another wall combines one bold orange canvas with two smaller, more modest green ones (one light, one dark). A third wall contrasts one black canvas with a lemon yellow one.  In Snyder’s office hang a smallish, medium green, diamond-shaped painting, a handsome royal blue vertical one and a long, narrow, horizontal cream-colored one.

Brilliantly assembled this way by Mr. Snyder, the ensemble represents a series of very carefully thought-out painting decisions — yet never do the results look cold or calculated. Instead, they’re characterized by warmth and a feeling of personal involvement.  Each painting has been built up individually from at least two layers of paint, enriched by interference and gel.  Griefen works on the floor, spreading first a layer of under-painting, then going on to the topmost layer. He uses a push broom for mixing and spreading the paint that leaves the many narrow, horizontal ridges in the paint that are his leitmotif.  And he stays with each painting until – as he says –  it “knocks me out,” and “has a softness I really love.”

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