September 15 to October 21, 2011
19 East 70th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues,
New York City, (212) 794-0550

Graham Nickson, Traveler: Red Sky, 2002. Oil on canvas, 110 x 146 inches. Courtesy of Knoedler & Company

On Cape Cod there is a bay that faces directly into the setting sun during the summer months. When the tide is low one can count up to seventeen sandbars before seeing the water’s edge more than half of a mile off shore. It’s a mind-bogglingly seductive scene. As the sun sets, the water trapped in between the long thin bars begin to shimmer, glow and turn hot orange, red and magenta, ringed with opalescent greens and blues. The sand bars go from reddish dirty blond to deep eggplant. The shore is lined with a cast of locals and tourists, many sitting on the dunes or posing for snapshots. When the last bit of the sun dips below the horizon, a din of clapping and whoo-hooing is heard followed shortly by the irregular hum of engines starting up to take the spectators home.

But for Graham Nickson, this is the time when the colors are the most intense. He knows to stay and look. He knows also the challenge of such a moment and of such a theme.

In the aptly titled exhibition, Paths of the Sun, Nickson demonstrates his capture of the transitory in a forty-year sampling of over 40 bedazzling paintings and watercolors of sunrise and sunset.

There are examples of the small paintings in hand painted frames from 1972-74 made during time spent in Rome, when he initially adopted this time-worn theme and aimed at making a fresh interpretation of it.  These small format works articulate a certain conception of light and a synthesis of abstraction and figuration that resulted in images that Nickson to this day continues to explore. The gemlike quality of these small-format works is emphasized by the wide, flat, profiled frames, which also underscore the individuality of each image. They link, in my mind, to the experience of finding small treasures in dimly lit churches.

Graham Nickson, Tree of Birds, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches. Courtesy of Knoedler & Company

A group of watercolors, installed in a grid, conveys Nickson’s idea of painting the same tree as a foil to sunrises and sunsets. These are characterized by large, interlocking areas of brightly colored wash with hatched lines that become, bush, tree, branch and so on. They represent some of Nickson’s most extra sensory visions of the forces of nature upon his subject.  Each is an animated world of its own, recalling the watercolors of Charles Burchfield and the newest large-scale paintings of Per Kirkeby, to be seen a few blocks away at Michael Werner Gallery. A second group of figureless watercolor landscapes of sunrise or sunset mesmerize with pulsating orbs and bands of rich color.

But three monumental paintings anchor and at the same time steal the show.  They make me want for more, not because they are deficient in any way, but becuase they are so full of so much that is absent in a great deal of painting today.  A deep pleasure in viewing Nickson’s work is being able to discern the direct, straightforward use of the medium. To see the hand at work, to feel the effect of the choice of the oversized canvas, to be brought along as a viewer as if participating in the spectacle of this work: these are seldom achieved by anyone in today’s climate of immersive, overwhelming spectacle.

The theatricality of sharp contrasting colors of red, orange, pink, deep blue, gray and violet in Traveler; Red Sky (2002), as well as in Red Lightening (2008-10) creates powerful epic images.  Although these paintings produced a lingering emotional reaction, the most recent of the three, Tree of Birds (2009-11), is the most challenging for its seemingly effortless combination and arrangement of both representational and abstract elements.

The scene, a tree of birds before a massive volcano within a mountain chain, is painted in shades of blue, grey, and violet, off-set by areas of light yellows and greens. A patchwork of interlocking clouds fill the sky, drop in front of mountains and cast shadow shapes upon fields below. There is a funky-chunkiness to these slightly comic, awkward forms as well as a remarkable compression between the foreground, middle ground and background. Shapes belonging to the background are pulled to the front of the picture plane and vice versa. Clusters of pale color are geometrically deployed in subtle triangulation that interestingly brings emphasis to the volcano peak. Here, we find a small, white shape, just like the pale lavender one to its right, which, surprisingly, is a bird in flight and not a cloud. One can imagine being in this scene and yet the painting conveys the immensity and mystery that we know of and experience but can never fully capture.

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16 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues,
New York City, (212) 288-8808

Since he graduated from Yale in 1986, Anthony Fisher has been painting still life and the human figure. His portraits actually have an element of still life about them, for while drawings are done from live models,  paintings are made from either casts taken from these models or from plaster busts. His newest series of monumental, seething and tragic portraits are among his strongest to date.

Anthony Fisher, Interior II, 2010. Oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Mourlot

For his second solo show in New York, the Boston-based artist has included a range of drawings that allow for an expanded, behind the scenes view of the project. The five paintings of larger-than-life size heads are all centrally positioned frontal views, often in a neutral space. They are as much drawn as they are painted. Thickly layered paint is equally scraped off as painted on, with admixtures of colors that instantly link the work to notable predecessors such as Soutine, Giacometti, Picasso, and Bacon, as well as with such contemporary painters as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, John Walker, and Cecily Brown.

Some of the drawings are done simply in charcoal, others combine Conté crayon with pencil or ink pen with acrylic wash. Some, almost frugal in their treatment, are studies for the paintings, while others, such as ones of the artist’s mother, exude an elegiac wistfulness.  All are articulate working drawings. Unlike much contemporary drawing created through the accumulation of small, illustrative lines, as complete works rather than studies, Fisher’s fluid, gestural lines combine with wide side-of-the-crayon marks that instantly inflate the page, giving volume, mass and breath to the heads. Here we can follow the artist’s working hand and witness a searching mind probing the form while exploring the position, expression, and mood of the head. The drawings, which can stand on their own, are also referential to the paintings.

The representation of a specific individual dates back to Greek and Roman times. In the twentieth century, practical and social functions, along with likeness and a sense of reality, slowly gave way to more varied interpretations for painted portraits. However, as Erwin Panofsky noted, contemporary portraiture still “seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity.”   At first glance one might not feel they have much at all in common with Fisher’s isolated and intensely raw-appearing heads. Yet in short time, the eye begins to perceive traces drawn in—on or through the scraped underlayers—that flesh out these somewhat carrion-like heads. We begin to read Fisher’s entire process as a way to capture, through accumulation, an aspect of time, emotion and the feeling that some part of being human must always remain elusive.

Fisher’s paintings are meta-portraits inspired initially by a white plaster copy of a pivotal polychrome bust made in the fifteenth century by Donatello, from which he worked for nearly a year, simply to determine in paint the expression and position of the form. Eventually Fisher made a plaster cast of his own longtime model. After hundreds of drawings and dozens upon dozens of sessions with each of the canvases—always with a near compulsive adding on and wiping out process — Fisher built his response to the bust in front of him Like Giacometti, also an obsessive reworker of images, Fisher is fascinated with the ineffable mysteries and existential challenges of the human figure and psyche.  Several of his works are titled “Interior.”

Anthony Fisher, Greg, 2009. Conté crayon on paper, 17 x 14 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Mourlot

Except for swaths of intense cerulean blue in some paintings, the color here is somber, harsh, and earthy. These are not fleshy paintings even though the paint is very, very juicy—especially on the faces, where it accumulates into confectionary-like moments of illusion. Fisher isn’t looking at flesh, but rather at plaster, while recalling the skin of his sitters and marble sculptures -both of which can have a particular earthly chill.

In returning day after day to the portrait underway, Fisher registers the minute differences of his own attitude, his own state of being. Through a determined and relentless pursuit of an ultimately impossible to seize reality, the work evokes much of the internal questioning that we all have in common. His deft manipulation of color, light, and space imbues these portraits with vivid sensations that yield a high degree of pictorial poetry. It’s a remarkable achievement considering these paintings begin as a response to a stark, inert plaster cast of a bust.

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Cora Cohen, Curtain 2008. Acrylic and Flashe on linen, 75 x 103 inches. Courtesy of Micahel Steinberg Fine Art

Overheard at Cora Cohen’s current exhibition was a viewer who wondered aloud “…What would it be like to work today within an idiom as established as abstract expressionism?”

This good question was delivered with something that could be understood as suppressed wonder. I imagined the next thought of the viewer to go something like this: “As if… today…– in this town of towns -how dare, how… could an artist?”

In this show Cohen makes evident tribute to the shaping influences of artists such as Kline, de Kooning, Pollock, and Wols and yet, with seemingly equal force of curiosity explores her fascination with the humble, yet visibly rich, impossibly chaotic, anti-heroic marks and stains of life from street culture: the entropy of urbanism.

Rather than following a single stylistic thread, the ten paintings on view tend to follow thematic paths; each distinguished by its own surprising internal logic. Paintings tend be paired or grouped according to optical relationships and related painterly syntax. The binding concept is their ability to reflect singular investigations that speak a common language. ‘Cohenese’ entails many painterly elements, techniques and studio actions such as the recurrent use of irregular rectangles, blunt fragmented strokes, gestural smears, cobbled blobs, sinuous lines, thick pours, intense scraping and delicate veils of paint.

Cohen employs tape, paper, wood veneers, studio debris and spray paint with the same skill and proficiency as with the more conventional materials of oil, acrylic, linen, canvas, ink, enamel and pigments.

Curtain, (2008), the largest painting in the show, occupies most of a wall near a north-facing window where its colors seem to literally fill with air. It features ghostly bone-like forms awkwardly nestling amid multiple layers of muted brownish-lavender washand creamy whites with hints of mineral green. It is purely abstract in image and effect alike. Forms become clouds, then spills, then bones, then traces of footprints in mud, then strokes, then spills, then clouds again!  What may initially recall the dirty clay and rubble floor exposed during infrastructure upgrades can just as eloquently evoke oxidized, faded frescoes of a Cimabue at Assisi. Just as the systematic opening and then closing of a street’s surface seems to have a physical counterpart in the activity of Cohen’s studio, colors from both inside and outside the history of painting are fluently put into play.

True, the work betrays deep affinities with Abstract Expressionism in all its international guises, including Automatism, Art Informel, Tachisme. But Cohen is not merely working within an established idiom. She widens the net of possibilities. In a decades-long engagement in painting thathas flowed in and out of the stream of abstraction’s brief history, this broadly conceived exhibition reflects an expansive formal reach as well as a playful, dramatic, spirit. Cohen’s painting is a seriously sensual and imaginative response to life.

December 14, 2006 to February 3, 2007

traveling to the Wiegand Gallery of Notre Dame of Namur University
January 20 to March 3, 2008

Melissa Meyer, Triptych #2 VSC 1992 oil stick on paper, 30 x 67-1/2 inches. Private Collection

What is it to exhibit the black and white works on paper of Melissa Meyer made between 1984 and 1994? What is it to momentarily gather and present this work apart from the current color-rich, exuberant, work that the artist is known for? And what are it to do so when these works were initially adjacent to but not the main body of work at that time? Among many possible answers, one is that in doing so, viewers are shown something akin to the back-story; the back-stage efforts, investigations and private discoveries that Meyer was engaged in. Some of these discoveries have been transformed and reappear in the current work.

These varied works show the many formal possibilities at Meyer’s disposal. It is tempting to try to identify parts of the language such as calligraphic lines and luminous scrims of paint that we see in her work to date and to anticipate which of those possibilities might resurface in future works. And we see that these discoveries have as much to do with form as they do with color.

Many of the works on view are drawings done in charcoal or oil stick on paper and read as exploratory efforts while some monumentally scaled pieces, made in oil or oil stick on paper, are robust statements. A range of compositions and image types signal the influence of past masters such as, Matisse, De Kooning, Pollock, yet ,each have information reflecting this artist’s searching and critical process that was underway at the time. The work registers influence or influence is noted but only in the way that is analogous, for example, to the way we think see a masked face in a cloud one second that shifts into a belly dancer the next. InUntitled, Triptych #2, 1988 and Triptych#2 VSC 1992, there is a familiarity to the high contrast, cut-out-like positive–negative interlocking forms, but as we follow the forms we discover the image resists being locked into simple association. It seems to change as we view it or is it we who change as we view it?

These works evolved as a secondary part of her practice. They were made concurrently with colorful paintings that she was developing for exhibitions at the time. Meyer has remarked, “After working in watercolor and oil, in the end I would do something in black and white to check the tonality and activity of the forms to see if they had strength.” In an untitled drawing in oil stick done in 1986, Meyer has brought several types of marks and speed to bear on the surface. A swoop of calligraphic line falls from the top left of the page and stops just short of a ghost-like, grayish vertical form that is partially covered by a solid black bug-like form made with thick, forceful strokes. In this piece one can see the antecedents of Meyers horizontal-vertical rhythm, positive-negative shape-making, decentered composition, calligraphic line and veils of color; characteristic elements of the artists work today. In this case the attitude and aim of Meyer’s abstraction seems to have more in common with her contemporary peer, Bill Jensen, than with those of earlier generations. In this drawing there is a range of force, variety of stroke, and ambiguity of scale which together hint at a notion of time, distance and continuity to suggests a view that is at once cosmic and microscopic.

Pat Lipsky, Proust's Sea 2006 oil on canvas, 81-3/4 x 62 inches Courtesy Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Amid today’s unlimited range of styles and endless combinations of media competing for art world support,  one of the great innovations of early Western modernism, Abstract art, continues to garner attention, evolve, and in many cases deepen in the hands of some of its current practitioners. Such is the case of veteran abstract painter Pat Lipsky whose career spans three decades marked by explorations in both abstraction and representation, and as demonstrated by her most recent aptly titled exhibition” Color Paintings” she continues to advance the issues of her work.

The grid based format of the nine human scaled paintings in the exhibition is becoming a recognizable trademark structure for this artist, placing her in the company of such reductive, contemplative painters as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin. Five vertical columns of varying widths are sub-divided at midpoints that in cross section appear as ascending and descending steps, which dip down or rise up in the center. In most cases three narrower columns frame two wider central columns that contain her carefully arrived at, in-between, colors within the ten rectilinear blocks, or segments, created by the divisions. The symmetrically deployed colors allow for a myriad of associations such as landscapes viewed through a colonnade, renaissance facades, geometric patterns, ornamental motifs and blocky figures.

In “Proust’s Sea”, 2006, two central columns feature colors that recall sky and earth are framed by three columns of colors that recall earth and sea. Naming the blues, greens, umbers and teals become a fruitless exercise because those names are never adequate to describe how the colors behave in their arrangements. Subtle hue shifts occur within similarly colored segments . One is apt not to notice her mastery of color because it all seems just right. The blues, at once radiant and atmospheric are activated by the somber tones of browns and greens. Credit is due to the handling of her edges for the additional vitality of the work. One could journey quite far simply following the lines, spaces, smudges and blurs that separate the segments. The surfaces are delightfully polluted with traces of life, dust hairs, blobs of dried paint which underscores the fact that these are hand made paintings, and although they may make allusions to an ideal they are full of the irregularities and imperfections of life.

Kim Uchiyama, Untitled 2006 oil on Canvas, 48 x 40 inches Courtesy Galleria Janet Kurnatowski

Kim Uchiyama and Barry Goldberg also make work that participates in a late modernist conversation, however, while Uchiyama explores the poles of expansion in her brightly colored banded abstractions, Goldberg mines the poles of reduction in his spare oil and encaustic canvases.

In her current exhibition titled “Strata”, Ms. Uchiyama’s landscape based abstractions come in a portrait format of stacked horizontal bands of colors. Muscular strokes of thick oil paint, in varying widths, span the surface and are interrupted by intervals of segmented color blocks. Her expressive paint handling brings to mind the built up surfaces and rough edged strokes of Sean Scully; however, the space she evokes is decidedly more referential. In  “Untitled “ 2006, saturated hues of red yellow and blue are tempered by occasional off whites and lighter blue hues. Thin lower bands of dark colors seem compressed by the weight, heat and vitality of wide red and yellow bands in the upper layers, serving as an apt metaphor for the effects of time upon landscapes and civilizations.

Barry Goldberg’s  paintings at first seem to be primarily about ground. However, in most of the works on view from 2006, a thin colored frame of buttery encaustic color superimposed upon a field of oil color.  This thin frame seems to delineate a figure within the field thus unsettling and in some cases reversing the reading of what is figure and what is ground.  “City Square in the Rain” 55 x 42inches, brings to mind the rounded shape of a subway car window. A two inch wide blue encaustic stripe circumnavigates the canvas; it’s position, an inch or so from the edge creates an outer frame of remaining olive green ground. Inside, an atmospheric grey blue area recalling a foggy, rain soaked window is streaked with occasional vertical lines, traces left by the sharp edge of the tool as it pulled successive layers of oil color down the surface. At once, alluding to rain as in the title, these hair like marks also describe with considerable clarity the process of how the work was made. The muted color grounds are often activated by the presence of the brightly colored encaustic frame. For example, in “Rysa Szpara” 2006, a scarlet-vermillion frame enhances the reddish identity of the brown field and adds warmth to the cool cream color of the top field.

These three diverse painters made me think of something Agnes Martin once said, “Anything can be painted without representation.”