1. Bice Lazzari: Stacatto in a Blue Musical Forest.“Untitled” Richard Saltoun Gallery at Independent Art Fair 2023
2. Mary Watt: Sky-water dives into a deep river and walks into the forest, searching for light. “Shared Horizon ( Keepers of the Western Door), Marc Strauss Gallery at Armory 2023
3. Lakela Brown: Ancient gold piercing our history and our heritage. “ Composition #2 with Doorknocker Earrings, 56 Henry at Armory 2023
4. Stuart Lantry:Ferris wheel riding with gifts facing a dangerous reality. “Asleep at the reinvented wheel”, Spring Break 2023
5. Ed Baynard with a lineup of our daily treasures – “Bowl painting” , James Fuentes at Independent Art Fair 2023
6. Allan Wexler:Coffee seeks its own level. Jane Lombard Gallery at Independent Art Fair 2023
7. Pepe Mar:Face Off (Philodendron), 2023, mixed media and acrylic on museum board, 24 x 20 inches, David Castillo at Armory 2023
8. Gregg Woolard:Ancient call for energy and synergy in orange metaphors. “Valley of Kings”, Max Fish at Spring Break 2023
Mike Hansen, Off Minor, Big Band (Jazz Series), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Classical music and contemporary jazz is wound tightly into every thread of the weave of Mike Hansen’s “Spot-o-fi” installation of watercolours, canvases, and plaster sculptures at Lonsdale Gallery in Toronto. Scan the QR code on the exhibition labels, and hear the music that gave life to the artist’s visual output. Yet, there is no necessary chain here that binds one to the other. Hansen admits that his painterly output amounts to a critique on abstract expressionism and its latter day emotional hangover, a purely visual art conversation between modernism and its post-painterly derivations. Consequently, the “Spot-o-fi” visual wall art stands alone against the welter of Hansen’s “wall of sound” references.
Mike Hansen Spot-o-fi installtion view
If Hansen has a go at abstract expressionism’s watered down derivatives, he also manages to save some powder for the music streaming platforms of our day. His exhibition title, “Spot-o-fi” is a dig at the prevalent algorithms, encouraging a type of lazy listening that tend ultimately to denigrate the sonic masterpieces he references to background noise.
Mike Hansen, A Love Supreme (Jazz Series), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 74 x 74 inches (four canvases)
No better example of a modernist painter steeped in music, who succeeded in as tight a threading of sound and image as anyone, was of course, Paul Klee. The 2008 “Melody and Rhythm” exhibition at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria was a tribute to the Swiss artist’s uncanny ability to evoke “sound composition” from colour, line, and texture.
Mike Hansen, Reflections on Gnossienne No 3, 2023, acrylic on epoxy, 27 x 11 x 8 inches
I make the Klee reference since the painted forms of Hansen’s four-panel “A Love Supreme (Jazz Series)”, for instance, a tribute to Coltrane’s opus, draw no obvious parallel to the music that may have inspired them. Brightly coloured, amorphic cutout shapes that waft and melt in airy layers, possess a graphic life independent of sound – unless of course, a conscious inference is made to connect them. The positive for Hansen plays to the materially visual art in the exhibition, and that the gloss-candied surfaces of his sculpture production appear good enough to eat, can’t be held against the artist.
This fall in New York, the work of sculptor Sophia Vari (1940-2023) is the focus of a retrospective exhibition in Chelsea, and an installation of twelve large-scale sculptures on Park Avenue. Together they give us a picture of this artist’s development, and its culmination in work created from 1997-2011.
In the exhibition at the Nohra Haime Gallery, the earliest pieces, from the 1980’s, are flowing, rounded depictions of small figures. These works anticipate the abstract works that followed through the 1980s – intriguing, beautiful sculptures whose curved forms intertwine, suggesting organic growth. The mythological titles of works evoke the birthplace of the artist in Attica, Greece. A prime example is CENTAURE ELEVANT DEIDAMIE [Centaur Kidnapping Deidame], with its golden, sensuous bulges suggesting the struggle of Deidame, (also known as Hippodamia, “tamer of horses”) with one of the centaurs who attacked her bridal party, attempting her abduction and rape.
In the 1990’s Vari’s work incorporated a new set of influences. There was an emphasis on intersecting planar structures that seem like a hybrid of the organic and the mechanical. They suggest the artist’s absorbing the examples of both Cubism and the Olmec culture of ancient Mexico, whose art included massive heads sculpted in stone. FORMES DU SILENCE [Forms of Silence] combines soft-edged geometry with curving shapes that suggest plant or animal life.
From the earlier compact works, Vari progressed to sculptures that stood vertically, suggesting abstract figural movement, and a winding, knotted energy. Polychromed planes, evident in the previous pieces, become defining characteristics here, lending a kind of painterly verve to these resolutely sculptural works. The presence of color and strong form are reflected in the collages from the 1990s through the 2000s, with their canted, rectilinear elements in paper and cardboard, enhanced by trompe l’oeil shadows in charcoal.
The twelve sculptures installed on the mall on Park Avenue from 53rd to 62nd Streets represent a quantum leap in Vari’s work, both in scale and artistic ambition. Tragically, the artist died just three days before the installation was completed. The work is presented by the Nohra Haime Gallery in collaboration with The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and the NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program. This suite of sculptures arrives in New York after having been shown in cities across the world including Paris, Rome, London, Beijing, Athens, Cartagena, and Geneva.
These are muscular, fully embodied works, reductive and staunchly modernist in their visual language of twisting, arced cubic elements. There are echoes of the rigors of Cubism and Constructivism, but a playfulness is at work here too. The sculptures are full of movement and compacted energy, and often suggest human conundrums or even individual personages. The bronze has a black patina, and selected planes are painted, usually in white, but at times red or yellow. The effect is strongly graphic, accenting the choreography of striding, reaching, and locking together.
The sculptures range in emotion from jaunty, to ominous, to satirical, all expressed abstractly. In the piece Point immobile [Still Point], the moment of equilibrium is reached, but paradoxically not by the reconciling of opposites. Rather, like for warring lovers, the quietude begins when the forms are so tightly bound that no further struggle is possible.
The sculpture Les serpentes de la guerre [The Serpents of War] features sinuous, vertical tentacles whose melding and separating are emphasized by long, white planes that contrast with the black, snaking curves. The planes end in two circular “heads” which hold a single white sphere, a form which Vari repeats, seemingly connoting a node of consciousness embedded in the physicality of form.
L’Homme (The Man), which like many of the sculptures is over ten feet tall, conveys the presence of a figure all wrapped up in himself, a monument to his self-possessed identity. His blindness to his pretention to power is signaled by the two tiny eyes in his massive cockscomb head, one a protruding orb, the other an unseeing concave space.
Sophia Vari: A Retrospective at the Nohra Haime Gallery, August 7 to September 30, 2023 and Sophia Vari On Park Avenue: A Tribute, Twelve Monumental Sculptures on Park Avenue, 62nd to 53rd St., New York, May 20 to November 5, 2023
Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette, the current exhibition at Overlap gallery in Newport, RI, features intricate collaged drawings, mixed media sculptures and paintings. Installed in a variety of configurations and formats, everything here suggests the peripheral representations one stores as secondary memory, the kind of imagery that might be spawned by subconscious prompts throughout the five senses. Within all this, there appears to be an overwhelming focus on the tactile quality of this mentally stored minutiae, details that keep all the visual effects fluid and stimulating without being too definitive or easily recognizable.
Maggie Nowinski, Somaflora Specimen – Friend or Foe I, 2023, Pen and ink and gouache on heavyweight Stonehenge paper, 28 x 42 inches
This series of works began during COVID when studio time for visual artists was unencumbered by social gatherings, work, or just plain “things to do.” Spanning over two years of detailed combinations of divergent imagery, materials and intentions, the approach of Nowinski and Renadette is very much like the 1925 Surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse, where artists added strange, unrelated drawings on the same piece of paper, and always in sequential order. In this instance, with Exquisite Variants, there is more of a back and forth between the two artists who find common ground in an aesthetic that speaks of the inner-worldly. Overall, the imagery is tinged with Surrealist undertones that combine biomorphic forms, indications of technology, manufacturing debris and unlikely transitions all enhanced by a very wild and wily palette.
What I find most intriguing about this exhibition is the way the exhibition ebbs and flows visually and viscerally through the use of certain repetitive details found in both the two and three dimensional objects. Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (2023) covers the largest wall of the gallery, driven by seemingly endless, individual, collaged ink drawings and mixed media sculptures that set in motion an evolving, multiplying, expanding organism. A potent structure of energetic expression built upon meditative mark-making and inward searching.
Maggie Nowinski & Alicia Renadette, Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (detail), 2023, Mixed media installation
In the worst times of the COVID pandemic, there was an overall fog of life, of not knowing how bad it would get, if you were its next victim, or if there would ever be light at the end of the tunnel. So it is not so surprising that anxiety levels would increase throughout the globe under such overwhelming stress. For whatever reason, artists have an innate ability to employ that negative energy into their work by channeling the flow of lines, shapes and colors from the subconscious, enabling them to represent the illusive space between survival and dread.
Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette ends September 10th. For more information visit the gallery’s website https://www.overlapnewport.com/
Jenne Currie, Feeling the Rhythm, 2023Feeling the Rhythm 16 x 16
By its nature, painting is a deceptive art; it seeks to present three dimensions with only two spatial planes. The perceptual shifts between these two and three dimensions create the optical illusion which in turn animates visual art. Two artists, Jenne Currie and Tracy Phillips present their paintings at the Associazione Culturale Castello 780 gallery venue in Venice, Italy. Although Currie works with collaged, sculptural shapes and Phillips paints nuanced, luminous forms, both artists confront the puzzle of the third dimension with comparable determination.
Jenne Currie, First Tango in Venice, 2023
Jenne Currie’s paintings balance sculptural space against the limits of the flat substrate. The shadows made by the suspended forms are influenced by the shifting ambient light. These ever-changing silhouettes allow the passage of time and its accompanying penumbra to serve as painterly components alongside with her pigments and mediums. The artworks all share an intense musicality as they collectively invoke the rhythm of dance, the convergent harmonies of sound and the suggested contours of instruments. The restricted palette and exuberant forms make for paintings that demand multiple viewings to determine the constantly shifting space.
Tracy Phillips, This Way Please, 2023
In contrast, Tracy Phillips’ complex and vibrant oil paintings straddle a universe that sways between within and without. Naturalistic light effects illuminate Intricate passageways while chromatic configurations balance on the cusp of the known and unknowable. The sensation is of an oneiric world originating somewhere deep inside the viewer and traversing beyond the self into more obscure realms populated by sensations. There is a familiarity with some edges and textures: a feather, a velvet cloth, a jewel or a shell; however, on closer inspection, recognition rapidly melts away and the viewer is left with visual memories. In Phillips’ hallucinogenic environment, we see the possibilities of an alternate biology that is neither inside of us nor outside but rather in the realm of the senses.
Tracy Phillips, The Heart of the Matter, 2023, 12 x 12 in, 30.5 x 30.5 cm
With paint and wood, Jenne Currie and Tracy Phillips unite as they harness the power of an intuited third dimension: Currie, by forging the forms and shadows of her sculptured paintings and Phillips, with intricate brushwork that animates fantastical worlds. Together, these painters make dynamic paintings that invite space and being.
Jenne Currie + Tracy Phillips. Castello Spaces, Castello 780 Gallery, Fondamenta San Giuseppe, Sestiere Castello 780, 30122 Venice, VE Italy. Gallery Hours: Thurs – Sun 3-7pm or by appointment Exhibition through September 10, 2023
