First New York show in a decade ends abruptly as storied gallery is shuttered

He demonstrates his capture of the transitory in a forty-year sampling.  Through October 21

Given their extraordinary force and paradoxical restraint, these paintings represent the kind of psychic change that distinguishes the fifties from the sixties.

If nature was his springboard, as Avery once famously declared, then in this body of work nature is also the lens through which he experienced the city.

“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure.

A “pink lady” is a cocktail made with gin, Grenadine, cream and egg white—the gin packs a punch masked by the more ladylike ingredients. The punch in this painting lies in how its image, suggesting (among much else) an orchid and a human heart, boils upward and outward, from its slate-blue core through the billowing peach and fuchsia of its sides to the splattering blast of blue and reds at the top.

The motifs of her seven paintings and four drawings are diverse to the point of perversity, suggesting the kind of mind drawn less to things than problems. What is consistent across these images is the sense of a fanatical empiricist picking quarrels with the perceived world.

Physical gesture means the artist’s hand is present yet transcended: there is no question that the arcs or circles are handmade, but an unforced, lyrical all-overness creates a cosmic, suprapersonal sense of order and well-being.

Knoedler & Company 19 East 70 Street 212-794-0550 February 3 – March 19, 2005 British-born John Walker is an abstract painter of singular power, fully in possession of his craft. As an artist and much admired teacher, his career has been illustrious and influential. Yet no exhibition should be seen through the distorting lens of … Continued

Robert Ryman PaceWildenstein until January 8 (534 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-7000). Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves Knoedler & Company until January 29 (19 E. 70th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-794-0550). Just as representation alters the way we view reality, abstraction has the same effect on representation itself: it has … Continued