print May 1966

Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle’s show at the Dwan Gallery consists of just two large polychrome sculptures, but has ample satisfaction for all this limitation. His recent work is a move away from the attenuated whittled volumes of his former style to an exclusive concern with huge planes of simple configuration bent and sprung through space. The traditional preoccupations of sculpture with the disposition of massy volumes is no longer a part of Doyle’s approach. The smooth colored surfaces he favors are flung billowing out grandly or flopped across struts to remain poised or slack, expressing energies and states

print May 1966

Robert Keyser

At Paul Rosenberg and Co. Robert Keyser shows fifteen visionary landscapes and interiors of a highly specific order. These fantasies are not concerned with the tidy transcription of inner emotional experiences but with the ambiguities of our analogical visual structurings of reality. The strange atmosphere of these oils comes not from the dream-made-vivid practice of orthodox Surrealism but from the apparent contradictions that arise when a picture contains, inextricably mingled, more than a single visual system.

The perils of this approach have of course defeated many artists who, from the time

print May 1966

Mary Frank

Mary Frank’s new exhibition at the Stephen Radich Gallery gives a very full idea of the range and variety of her art. Her sculpture (both reliefs and free-standing pieces) in wood and bronze are conclusive demonstrations of a rare ability, that of being able to double-clutch smoothly and with no loss of momentum from modeling to carving along a single course of imagery and expressive concerns. Stirred by a personal vision rather troubling in its grave poetry and sustained by a firm, developed craft, Mrs. Frank’s work is the statement of an artist who hasn’t hustled her development, but let it

print April 1966

Mark Di Suvero and David Novros

Downtown at the Park Place Gallery a two man show offers sculpture by Mark Di Suvero and paintings by David Novros. Di Suvero’s work is now sufficiently good that the inclusion of two rather playful pieces here does not detract from the essential gravity of his accomplishments. His New York Dawn: For Lorca is a massy accretion of “experienced” wood, beams, and bolts, cramped together in preservation of their sense of other, past functions and identities. Set lightly atop unobtrusive slender beams of black steel, two such elements warily approach one another. A thin steel pole topped with the

print April 1966

Lester Johnson

Lester Johnson’s show of “the Milford paintings” at the Martha Jackson Gallery consists of both figure pieces which continue and enlarge upon the big and simple statements of his last exhibition, and a group of still-lifes that essay new but not altogether unrelated painting questions. The figure paintings aim at a classical monumentality that would seem, on the surface of things, to be hopelessly at odds with his marled pigment, splattered and dribbled upon in the course of its manipulation with the knife. However, it is not a classical form which Johnson tries to construct, but rather a

print April 1966

Cply

At the Alexander Iolas Gallery Cply (William Copley) has a biggish show of paintings under the heading “Projects for Monuments to the Unknown Whore.” The pictures are all fantastic projections of erotic imaginings flavored agreeably with mild fetishistic elements. With one or two exceptions the compositions are scenes in which the artist’s personages (a blank-faced Kurvy Kutie with Bardot hair and an equally faceless gent in a herringbone tweed suit and a bowler) enact some tender drama. These gentle encounters, so nostalgically amorous, allow the observer to savor voyeuristically bordello idylls

print April 1966

Barbro Ostlihn

Barbro Ostlihn at Tibor de Nagy Gallery shows a group of meticulous symmetrically composed oils slightly obsessive in their treatment of recognizable objects in an unlikely scale and fiercely anal-compulsive in their elaborately titty-pooed renderings.

Dahlia presents a huge image of this flower, hovering just clear of the limits of a square canvas. The countless scarlet petals glow to yellow at the edges, suggesting a scorching blossom of incandescent steel floating in its field of blue. 91 Allen Street has a Sheeleresque rendering of a complex hydrant-like form that elaborates itself into the

print April 1966

Julio Le Parc

At the Howard Wise Gallery Julio Le Parc makes his solo debut in America after an earlier appearance here with the “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel.” His present showing is a series of mobiles and constructions that makes much use of mechanization and intricate lighting effects. These works depend to varying degrees on random movements produced by the intermittent action of a motorized element on different kinds of movable parts. Several of the pieces suggest gadget-games like vertical Japanese pinball machines. Jeu Visuel: Rouge-Bleu is a circular wall-mounted box containing two ping-pong

print March 1966

Victor Vasarely

Victor Vasarely, now showing at Janis, is seen this month in the most extensive of the one man shows he has had around town over the past few seasons. The success and interest of this exhibition are due to the varied facets of his art visible here; Vasarely has more irons in the fire than one might think, seeing only concentrated groups of a few works in a single key.

Together, several such groupings in the present show outline the artist’s range from the painful positive-negative alternations of his intense black and white pictures to the Near-Eastern lyricism of a group of very recent works.

print March 1966

Eduardo Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi’s current exhibition at the Pace Gallery is certainly the strongest of his New York exhibitions to date. Having established a sound if controversial reputation in America on the basis of his earlier works, the intricately textured bronzes that were biomorphic assemblages of small machine parts, he reappears now a transformed artistic identity, more mature, fluent, muscular, and daring.

His new pieces in chrome-plated steel or welded aluminum are still concerned with organic metaphors given in an industrial vocabulary, but do not, as before, seem accretions of mechanical debris

print March 1966

Arakawa

At the new Dwan Gallery the Japanese-born painter Arakawa shows a series of diagrammatic works like those included in a group show at Sidney Janis’ a year or so ago. The flavor of all these works is unabashedly neo-Duchamp. Keeping himself within the limits of precise linear drawings in black on large primed canvases, the artist rings numerous changes on the peculiar teasing quality of blueprint-like images presented within the context of painting. The tickle here comes from the fact that where we expect to see an image of something as it appears, we see structural diagrams, particularly in plan

print March 1966

John Carswell

British artist John Carswell makes his American debut at the Fischbach Gallery with a show of paintings and small objects. Severe, formal, and dated, Carswell’s paintings stay very much within the bounds, or rather strictures, of continental Constructivist-Purist ideas of the late twenties and early thirties. Disposing precise, more or less rectangular black and grey shapes over a white enamel ground, Carswell overlaps them in clear sequences derived ultimately from Malevitch’s pioneering works of five decades ago. However, the sequences and intervals are elaborated past simple superimposition

Dennis Adrian