print March 1990

Lawrence Kupferman

Lawrence Kupferman (1909–82) responded to the lessons of surrealist automatism and bio-morphism in a highly poetic and personal manner. Like his contemporary and friend Mark Rothko, Kupferman worked as a WPA artist, and first exhibited in New York in the early ’40s. However, he chose to make Boston his home and became historically more associated with the expressionist school in that city, which included Jack Levine, Hyman Bloom, and Karl Zerbe, than with the first generation of the New York School. This carefully selected exhibition of four oils and seven works on paper reinstates Kupferman as

print February 1990

GERRY BERGSTEIN: A SELF-CONFESSED COUCH POTATO

GERRY BERGSTEIN, IS THE KIND OF ARTIST that Harold Rosenberg (whose concerns were paintings, politics, and intellectual history) might have written about. Bergstein’s canvases are arenas for expressing the artist’s fantasies about bounty and emptiness, high-art ideals and commercialism, sexuality and purity. At the same time, these paintings wittily burlesque the fevered act-critical debates of the postwar era. The spatters, drips, impasto and accident of Abstract Expressionism share the canvas with meticulously rendered trompe l’oeil images of junk food, '50s icons, and household utensils, with

print February 1990

Julia Kidd

Julia Kidd groups together 18 works from the past five years for a thought-provoking installation entitled “Home Is Where Your House Is.” Kidd explores the fragility of American consumerist myths in these multimedia meditations on house and home. Home Is Where Your House Is III, 1989, features a photograph, printed on wallpaper, of a front garden and trees leveled by a hurricane. Superimposed on this disaster photograph are five cartoon silhouettes of a young boy learning to walk on stilts. Metaphorically, the collision of these particular images suggests the fragility of the home, whose security

print January 1990

David Brody

David Brody’s fantastic narrative paintings explore the dualities of sexuality and power through images that provide a stunning visual punch. The boldness of style, Freudian themes, and brash technique in these hotly colored works reveal a self-awareness and confidence that is extremely refreshing. Brody begins by painting figures on wood panels, employing a stylistic spectrum spanning primitive through cartoon style. He then adds panels or dissects the wood ground, as the narratives intuitively unfold. Brody embraces fetishism by hammering nails directly through the panels, leaving their sharp

print December 1989

Maggi Brown

Maggi Brown’s nine new canvases explore the possibilities of content in abstract painting. She based this series of fundamentally monochromatic canvases on Russian Orthodox icons, retaining their essential spirit and form while eliminating their figures and coloration. Her sensuously textured oils are dominated by quasi-architectonic arches and columnar lines. Brown’s own trademark checkerboard grids contradict the moody sublimity of the vaults and arches and provide the work with a mixture of styles that is decidedly post-Modern. These signature checkerboards are not kin to the perfect grids

print November 1989

Donald Lipski

Donald Lipski takes industrial salvage material and creates unique neo-dada sculpture. He finds artifacts in junk stores, dumpsters, and military supply rooms, employing a surreal logic in his clever mating of them. This exhibition, consisting of two distinctly separate installations of recent work, showed Lipski to be adept at tempering the coolness of minimalist form with poetic irony and a sense of humor. Steel wool and industrial waste tubing were the featured materials here. In one group of works, industrial components—a rubber high-pressure hose, aluminum fan blade, saw, or inner tube—define

print October 1989

Natalie Alper

The eight paintings that Natalie Alper showed here all begin with pencil marks—scribbled and wavy lines that pay subtle and poetic homage to Cy Twombly. These marks are then overlaid with turbulent strokes of rich acrylic paint. Black and white lines weave freely through pearlescent passages of color, creating a complex Piranesian spatial tension and illusion of depth. By combining a metallic color palette with earth tones, Alper contrasts an industrial world with a more elemental one.

The artist’s paintings connote the flow of water and, like the deluge drawings by Da Vinci that inspired them,

print October 1989

Dorothea Rockburne

A decade of explorations into the transcendent qualities of abstraction, light, and geometry reveal themselves in this evocative installation of 26 works by Dorothea Rockburne. Renowned for her visual articulations of the sublime, Rockburne explores the multiplicity of corporeal and incorporeal relationships between rectangles, triangles, and squares. This exhibition, which documents Rockburne’s shift from drawing to painting in the ’80s, presents a cohesive, evolving body of non-objective art. It moves from the elegant series of white folded canvas rectangles and the fragile watercolor-on-vellum

print Summer 1989

Michael Corris

Michael Corris has created a series of provocative pieces here that suggest a departure from his recent layered images of bar graphs. The focal piece of this show, entitled “Reading by Candlelight,” was Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, 1989. The work consists of 11 bundles of shingles that serve as the base for a silver candelabra and a copy of a text by Stalin; the latter is embedded in colored wax and mounted on a wood block. The paraffin which covers the pamphlet is joined with strings that serve as wicks and transform the object into a votive candle. The wood shingles act as both platform

print May 1989

Bryan Hunt

This selection of three small sculptures and ten drawings, executed between 1986 and 1989, is further evidence of Bryan Hunt’s facility for combining the languages of abstraction and figurative representation. No longer concerned primarily with the waterfall configuration, Hunt frequently places figures in geometric settings. His sculptures, in particular, are becoming increasingly anthropomorphic and metaphysical in character. In Astronomer, 1986, a thin cast-bronze figure with a loop on its lap sits on a chair. The figure balances above it a tiny bronze orb placed on a cylinder, suggesting a

print April 1989

Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell’s art is both formally elegant and politically savvy. The works here span a variety of mediums: tough and dramatic photo-based pieces; text-laden paintings; and small-format collages created primarily from photographs and postcards. Most of the works have hard-hitting racial messages and the raw power of convictions deeply felt.

Autobiography: Air/CS560, 1988, is a moving example of the power of Pindell’s commitment to social protest. The work combines a number of media (acrylic, tempera, oilstick, paper, polymer photo transfer, and vinyl tape) on an irregularly shaped, cut-and-sewn

print March 1989

Harold Tovish

Two concurrent exhibitions of Harold Tovish’s work showed this veteran artist still to be relevant and committed to change. The Addispn Gallery retrospective, the first comprehensive survey of Tovish’s art to be assembled since his 1968 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, contained over 100 works dating from 1948 through 1987, including sculpture, drawings, and prints. The Howard Yezerski Gallery housed a companion exhibition of 16 ink and charcoal works on paper, created in the last two years, and based on the theme of hands. Both shows emphasize the artist’s overwhelming concern with the

Francine A. Koslow