Dennis Adrian

• 

  print January 1966

  Group Show

  A group show of contemporary sculpture at World House points up an unsettling aspect of newer sculpture; almost every artist represented looks better in company than alone. As a whole, the show holds to the clean-form, constructed, polychrome approach. The feeling throughout is jazzy and knowing, but what is known seems to be how to cut a good figure in public rather than how to make good sculpture. The best pieces are by those artists with some experience and maturity in their styles. A very simple and wacky Di Suvero is just a hanging sheet of brass, snipped, curled, and bolted. With one

• 

  print January 1966

  Nathan Oliveira

  Nathan Oliveira’s show at the Alan Gallery is a disappointment. Instead of the meaty paintings struggling to get around Giacometti’s figures in De Stael’s space seen before, the present works are mostly collage-painting with that “potent myth” kind of subject matter patented ages ago by Lebrun and Baskin. Titles such as The Magnificent; The Absurd underscore this embarrassing fumble into bathos. Several pictures deal much too freely with nudes toppling manneristically into space in poses of dejected anguish. A great deal of sloppy overpainting in matte and shiny black over obscured collage

• 

  print January 1966

  Frank Gallo

  Frank Gallo’s exhibition at Graham gives the public a better look at this figurative sculptor’s work than it was possible to get at the Whitney group show of younger artists this past spring. His widely-reproduced figure of a girl literally sinking into a butterfly chair is of course considered his chef d’oeuvre, and is a masterpiece of winking anecdotalism. His present show gives this lemon one more squeeze. This time it’s a clothed man sitting in a chair. This image (as a type) is competing out of Gallo’s league. Manzu’s neurasthenic seated woman in the Museum of Modern Art deals so masterfully

• 

  print December 1965

  Man Ray

  Man Ray groups a number of his best-known vintage Surreal and Dada objects with some very recent collages and constructions, revealing the artist still very much at the top of his irreverent form. Largely sight gags in concrete form, the pieces range from the menacing “Object of Destruction” to the deadpan wit of “Architexture: Tip Your Hat.” Man Ray’s objects have always attested to his ingratiating gift for unlikely juxtapositions. The classic “Cadeau” (a flatiron with its working face vertically bisected by a row of nails pointing out) epitomizes the perceptual disorientation at the root of

• 

  print December 1965

  James Weeks

  James Weeks’ new paintings make another strong show by this Californian, though the seriousness of the problems stated in these works perhaps surpasses the degree of successful resolution reached in any single picture. Weeks again and again runs head-on into the difficulty of maintaining the structural integrity of his compositions on the picture plane while using pictorial schemes that involve reckless excursions into deep landscape space. His high color, tending to angular areas, sacrifices volume in his forms to compositional arrangements curiously at variance with the plasticity implied by

• 

  print December 1965

  Patrick Heron

  Patrick Heron’s current exhibition of oils makes a more forceful statement of his own abilities as an abstractionist than did the reverent curtsies to Gottlieb and Rothko seen in earlier shows. Heron has tightened up his form a great deal, now letting the contours pursue a course of sensitive irregularity with discernible purpose rather than poetic vagueness. Block slabs of color are pierced with roughish circles of contrasting hue that are sometimes a background color and sometimes that of another adjacent area. Intricately locked together by their common perimeter, the big main forms have a

• 

  print December 1965

  Roger Bolomey, Duane Hatchett, David von Schlegell and Robert Howard

  A group show of one work apiece by four sculptors at Royal S. Marks makes it clear that the quality and interest of current sculpture continue to press toward higher standards within the straight sculpture approach of form and volume disposed in space with a minimum of associative meanings.

  Roger Bolomey, who has been more than usually libeled by the unsatisfactory nature of photographic reproduction, is represented with a large Wind Gate of polyurethane and aluminum. Meant to be set against a wall, this piece unfurls two large waves of blackish material, seemingly wind-formed, which almost meet