print February 1989

Judy Haberl

Judy Haberl’s puzzle paintings combine found objects, paper, and paint to create dense objects that pose playful questions about the nature of appropriation. Haberl’s Rauschenbergian fantasies juxtapose kitschy artifacts with a more personal vision of reality. Her earlier works included jigsaw-puzzle reproductions of paintings by masters of Modern art; the 11 new collages contain jigsaw-puzzle images of traditional landscapes, still lifes, and nature studies. The puzzle pieces investigate the possibilities that arise from reconstructing banal puzzle parts so that they become something dramatic

print January 1989

Sam Messer

Sam Messer’s heavily painted canvases manage to evoke the mythical sensibilities of Jackson Pollock’s work of the early ’40s, and at the same time call attention to their contemporary self-conscious expressionism. The predominant colors in the artist’s recent paintings are red, black, yellow, and white: they are applied with fleshy bravura. The works show a maturing artist contributing to a revival of gestural painting with symbolic figuration. Messer’s sense of the macabre is balanced by a penetrating black humor. Look into the Future, 1988, depicts a very pregnant nude holding a mirror in one

print December 1988

John O’Reilly

John O’Reilly’s black and white Polaroid collages are intelligent combinations of art history’s past and O’Reilly’s personal fantasies. His most recently constructed inventions juxtapose images of classical male statuary, paintings by Caravaggio, and photographs by F. Holland Day and Wilhelm von Gloeden with nude self-portraits. These curious blendings of past and present, culture and commonplace, are contained in elaborate interior studio sets designed by O’Reilly. All 23 collages exhibited here have been carefully layered to create a contemporary magic-realist space. The pieces resemble whole

print November 1988

Mimi Gross

Long known for her collaborative installations with ex-husband Red Grooms and as the daughter of sculptor Chaim Gross, Mimi Gross has come into her own in an exhibition of six constructed reliefs and one large drawing. The large painted-wood triptych, Parnassus, after Raphael, 1986, is a playful parody of Raphael’s famous Vatican fresco and contains 26 individuated figures divided into three separately constructed groups. With her witty and theatrical touch, Gross replaces Raphael’s soft elegance, atmospheric perspective, and academicism with her own educated roughness of proportion, scale,

print October 1988

Mary Sherwood

Mary Sherwood’s lushly painted fantasy landscapes are nostalgic and lyrical pastiches of paintings from the 16th through the 19th century. Images are borrowed from art history and reformulated into reflections on nature and culture. Nine of the ten oil paintings, all from 1987–88, are divided into two series, entitled “Birds of Fiction” and “Myths of Progress.” The former are large landscapes on canvas that integrate imaginary allusions to Baroque and American Romantic art, and the latter are landscapes painted on wood with square insets of details from Dutch and Flemish paintings. In this uneven

print Summer 1988

Russell Floersch

Russell Floersch’s elegantly painted surfaces combine ghostly references to commercial real-estate advertisements with virtuoso graphic and painterly techniques. Brooklyn-based Floersch is subtly political in his fragmented, faded graphite drawings of seductively ornate estates and poolside vistas that appear on small plaster areas of otherwise abstract paintings. He has developed a collage style based on the image, logo, typeface, and design of selected real-estate ads in the Sunday New York Times. Slick titles such as Bella Vista and Belvedere, both 1987–88, derive directly from the inflated

Francine A. Koslow