May 10 to June 22, 2012
511 West 25th Street, Suite  307, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-343-2468

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Leo Rabkin’s enchanting retrospective, spanning five of his nine decades (he was born in 1919),  includes a range of  work, although the vision is all of a piece.  What he demonstrates – something too rarely seen – is the ingenious, thoughtful, even tender transformation of ordinary materials into marvelous inventions. And marvel the viewer does.  Rabkin’s often modestly-scaled assemblages (there are exquisite works as small as 3¾ by 5¾ inches) comprise reliefs, boxes, works on paper, and collages.  They combine all manner of media: threads, metal, string, cords, beads, buttons, tiny nacre seashells, canvas, and myriad papers.  His papers are stained, inked, plaited, folded, frayed, suspended, and flocked.   Captivating and elegant, produced with the simplest, readily available materials, his works are undergirded by a refined structural sensibility, an acute but never insistent sense of measure, proportion, and color.  Strong organizing principles notwithstanding, the magic (an overused but apt term here) of these works may have something to do with a seeming offhandedness in their ad hoc presentation.  Onlookers are also transformed as we are made to consider or reconsider what we may routinely overlook—how shapes vary; elemental differences among materials, their properties and surfaces; and the possibilities of making whole fascinating little worlds by attentively concocting, composing, and (a great American tradition) tinkering with them..

In this last respect, Rabkin’s inventive assemblages recall Alexander Calder’s objects.  They too defy conventional terms like sculpture—their ingenuity bolstered by their unpretentiousness.  Rabkin’s works are visual poems: succinct and subtle.. Part of their appeal is surely the unprepossessing nature of his chosen materials, which are neither costly nor complicated.  He reinstates what may be deemed déclassé materials—rhinestones, goggle eyes, and flocking—and excites a reappraisal and appreciation for their glitter and curiosity.  We are drawn to appreciate the stitched dashes of silken red thread on fragile, slightly yellowed paper, or, in an untitled work from around 2011, the minuscule hairy filaments of flocking, used to achieve delicately lush, textured surfaces. A series of small white tissue-thin squares of fine folded paper, dated from around 2005, float on tiny tightropes through space, and are mirrored.  Once again, the simplest of objects are artfully made, leaving the viewer to wonder at just how stupendous light, air, weightlessness, and reflections can be.

Rabkin’s works share an affinity with the American folk and outsider art that he and his late wife long collected and which captivates him still.  Like them, the objects and images demonstrate how, with unremitting resourcefulness, immensity can result from little.  Whirligigs, weather vanes, game boards, postal sorting cubbies, whittled and painted figures, and a host of other doodads demonstrate how with unremitting resourcefulness, immensity can result from little.  That is a quality that he continues to develop.  Whether reflected in things he makes or collected, Rabkin stands in opposition to the slick, highly professionalized and manufactured aesthetic that has come to appeal to the mega pocketbooks of the art world today.

Rabkin makes frequent use of small boxes.  These boxed enclosures have a family resemblance to those of Joseph Cornell–though Rabkin’s small worlds are not hermetically sealed.  Like Cornell, Rabkin, with his lyrical imagination, creates intimate cosmologies.  His quiet little treasure chests (many found and recycled), like gifts or offerings, present the prospect of discovery, surprise, and wonder.  Plain on the outside, sometimes stenciled or finished with combed or delicately striated surfaces, even mysterious when closed, these containers may be opened to display a small theater of unexpected elements.  Part of their appeal is the special aura they emit through the carefully constructed transmogrification of materials: so beads strung in channels are mimicked and continued in drawn lines and glittery small beads glued against a dark panel become a celestial firmament Their order reminds us of Georges Santayana’s ruminations about the organization of the stars in the nighttime sky.

Rabkin studied art at New York University under Tony Smith, but his training did not channel his work into a self-consciously high art mode. The Luise Ross Gallery, where he buoyantly received admirers at his opening,  had its foundations in representing artists not formally trained—Bill Traylor for example (an artist whom Rabkin collected).  For many years he taught disturbed adolescents in the New York city schools, and devoted himself to his art only in the last several decades.  It may not, however, be a stretch to understand his unremitting glorification of the most elemental objects as part of a more general appreciation of what is there, good, and not to be taken for granted.

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The veteran Chicago painter and printmaker John Himmelfarb has recently turned to sculpture in a variety of mediums.  Several delightful examples of his foray into the third dimension are now on view in a rousing show entitled “Geared Up,” at Luise Ross Gallery. Himmelfarb’s ostensible subject is that most utilitarian of vehicles, the truck. The choice of motif might seem puzzlingly prosaic but in the hands of this artist, now in his seventh decade, becomes a funny and poignant metaphor for our knack for accumulating emotional baggage—psychic freight—and the increasing unlikelihood, as years go by, of finding a suitable place to dump it.

Himmelfarb’s flat work is restlessly graphomaniacal, as a lithograph titled Double Negative(2009) demonstrates. A timeworn but sturdy flatbed truck, its deep wheel wells and streamlined hood of pre-War vintage, is piled absurdly high with not-quite-nameable items that might conceivably include plumbing supplies, inflatable rafts, aircraft parts and/or semiabstract garden sculpture (but that’s just a guess). Graphically simpler, though still plenty convoluted, Drift Ice (2009) is a relief print in jet black and snow white in which the play of shapes takes on narrative and conceptual shades of gray: the rig and its cardo are either falling apart or coalescing, depending on your outlook.

In the exhibition’s namesake, Geared Up (2010), Himmelfarb draws with his jig saw, summoning from sheets of plywood a repertoire of well-honed shapes and rhythms. Cobbled together with spots of glue and a handful of nails, the piece is a lively heap of interpenetrating planes sitting astride unmistakably tire-like disks and surmounted by a trio of enigmatic protrusions that might be ladders or crane arms. The ad-hoc quality of its formal bouyancy has an unlikely elegance: Red Grooms meets Isamu Noguchi.

The beautiful, somber Mesa (2008), a three-and-a-half-foot-long bronze, is a hybrid of the eroded landform the work’s title indicates and a loaded lorry as if it broke down while making a wide right turn, lost a tire or two, and merged with the geography. The windshield and grille take on a physiognomical cast as it is easy to read them as wide, hollow eyes and gritted teeth.

Himmelfarb’s work has little to do with the spirit of the convoy, that fluid confederation of cross-country tractor-trailer drivers that became a sociological phenomemon and pop-cultural touchstone (“Good buddy, put the hammer down!”) by making Middle America aware, in the mid-1970’s, of the existence of subcultures in its midst. It’s more existentialist and individualist than that, as in the 16-inch-long Fortitude, a smaller truck inexplicably equipped with a distinctly simian front end, a huge gearlike tire, tanks and canisters galore, and a number of mysterious protuberances such as a wing or huge comb on the front fender, possibly deriving from outmoded or reinvenbted agricultural equipment. and other and possibly outmoded farm implements what looks like a reinvention of the ladder.

The spikey Knowledge looks at first like a collection ofbarnacle-encrusted boomerags and banana peels. It is set upon a plinth that brings it to eye level, enabling the viewer to get to know the nooks and crannies. In the manner of the sculptor William Tucker, the work is abstract from a great many angles; only its vestigial tires and bonnet, seen from three-quarter view, give away its vehicular origins. Visitors to the gallery should be sure not to miss Lander, displayed in a back room. It is a small and tidy, slab-built ceramic work with a beautiful polychrome glaze keyed to dark gray and neutralized pastel colors.

Back in the 1980’s, Himmelfarb did a series of drawings called “Boatman” in which mounds of prosaic junk, accoutrements of the everyday–stepladders, cigar boxes and the like—are piled high in a raft, threatening to sink it, and the anxious fellow piloting it. Just as his overburdened rafts struggle to remain afloat, Himmelfarb’s straining rigs somehow keep a-rolling. Perseverance (2006) is an eleven-foot-long painting keyed to orange-red, black, and pale blue-green. Through the loose, exuberant paint-handling the viewer discerns a barrelling semi nearly filling the frame, filled to bursting with tubs, spools, coils and cartons of unnameable, unknowable stuff. The truck is fully loaded, like the brush it was painted with. When art so witty, self-aware and bemused emerges from an artist’s accumulated experience, that load proves to have been worth schlepping, after all.

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In an exhibition simply entitled “Welcome,” which features paintings, a wall piece, works on paper, and sculptures from the early 1990s till today, Glenn Goldberg makes a strong case for the whimsical and the poetic. “Watch and live, pay attention, do what you can,” is his personal manifesto (from a statement published by the gallery.)  In a time when much of what is exhibited  feels generalized, slick, and superficial, Goldberg offers a romantic approach to painting that feels honest and inspired. With a sensitivity that reminds us of Paul Klee, he succeeds in combining playful forms with a tantalizing sensibility for nuances of light and color.

Goldberg’s work has repeatedly been linked to Tantric art, in particular in the way it establishes an analogy between the micro – and macrocosmic. However, the artist gleans from many sources and his works evoke many associations, ranging from Persian miniature paintings, Turkish tile patterns, and children’s book illustrations to works by artists as diverse as Richard Pousette-Dart, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Thomas Noszkowski. There is much variety and it is Goldberg’s strength to remain beyond strict categorization. With confidence, he navigates directions between abstraction and referential drawing, musical rhythm and dreamlike release, monochromatic and highly polychromatic palettes. Most of his imagery is rooted in the organic and yet conglomerates of patterned forms can establish structures that hint at geometric organization.

Meanwhile, there is a striking naivite in Goldberg’s work. It seems to tell of a time detached from worldly concerns which, especially in times like these , betokens escapism. Goldberg’s content feeds into this notion. In some of the works at Luise Ross Gallery, dove-like birds float freely through the compositions. They are delicately rendered, shown upside down, topsy-turvy, in black, white, or grey, their wings always spread as open as flower petals. These mythic creatures are not as much set against painted grounds, as they are ingredients of the overall compositional pattern. They are weaving in- and out of abstract plants, emerging from dark skies, dancing on stringed ropes, and are at ease while shifting through the textured landscapes that surround them. Rather than actual animals, they appear as spirits, who indulge in their freedom. The fragility and innocence in these images can be linked to Picasso’s  “Child with a Dove (1901) But there is also a strong sense of comfort here and Goldberg stresses the sentiment by naming his works “Blanket,” “Amidst it All,” and “Bloomer,” for example. As suggested in these titles, “things are kept safe,” “in the center of it all,” and “on the brink of flourish,” as long as they are in the hands of Goldberg. This goes along with Goldberg’s conviction that “art is supposed to take you towards, not away.”

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