print May 1993

Kerry James Marshall

Though not a self-taught artist, Kerry James Marshall has chosen to incorporate aspects of outsider art into his practice, placing the flat forms of his simplified figures within a shallow pictorial depth. Marshall’s use of naive art is deceptive, however, because he transforms the cheerfulness and charm we associate with such art into something subversive. As rooted in the tradition of the Blues, as he is grounded in his knowledge of Hollywood’s attitudes toward African-Americans, Marshall uses his knowledge of high art, folk art, and Pop culture to celebrate African-American culture and to

print Summer 1992

Catherine Murphy

With the exception of Jasper Johns’ Fool’s House, 1962, we have seen little in the past few decades that has anticipated the intersection of art and life in Catherine Murphy’s tightly framed realist paintings. Like Johns’ juxtaposition of broom and smeared surface, Murphy’s Moiré Chair, 1991, proposes a witty relationship between doing and seeing, particularly with respect to domestic routines. Indeed, to say that she is a realist painter is to miss all the ways in which she uses abstraction, the picture plane, and the odd angle in order to defamiliarize what is familiar—to make the scenes she

print May 1992

Sal Scarpitta

Sal Scarpitta’s art, which is simultaneously idiosyncratic and in touch with major European and American art movements, such as Futurism, arte povera, and Minimalism, has yet to be fully recognized in America. His deepest roots are in Futurism and in the quintessentially Modern impulse to represent speed that motivated that movement. And yet, like two other major postwar Italian artists—Piero Manzoni (it is not clear who influenced whom, or if they arrived at their “wrapped” or bandaged work independently) and Alberto Burri, who was a decided influence—Scarpitta is also a product of an art

print March 1992

Kathy Muehlemann

Many of Kathy Muehlemann’s abstract paintings from the past half decade are animated by a tension between diminutive scale and an allover deployment of images. This tension is further echoed by the images that are geometric and referential at the same time; one image simultaneously suggests a glowing planetary orb and an ellipse, for example. The paintings—many are approximately the size of a typical hardcover book—convey an intimacy (they are meant to be seen up close), while the allover fields evoke an expansiveness that exceeds the scope of our field of vision. In maintaining this tension,

print February 1992

Suzanne McClelland

Instead of contenting herself with the revelation of the stale perception that the mass media have emptied language of meaning, Suzanne McClelland combines words and paint to evoke the degree to which we are determined by words and the fictions they embody.

On a formal level, McClelland utilizes charcoal, acrylic, gels, clay, and rabbit-skin glue to investigate the conditional relationship between drawing and words, between painting and writing. Within these formal parameters, however, she pursues a more speculative and ultimately more engaging investigation of the zones between conventional and

print January 1992

Mark Schlesinger

Like many abstract artists who survived the ’80s, Mark Schlesinger’s subsequent paintings have been seen infrequently and mostly in scattered group shows. His approach to abstraction challenges the prevailing taste for formal reprisals of earlier styles and for knowing but critical nods to the past. In this respect, his paintings counter the general feeling that abstraction is no longer viable.

Schlesinger’s paintings not only vary in size and format and employ very different color combinations, but the surfaces range from rough, relatively thick (though clearly defined) areas to thin, smooth

print January 1992

James O. Clark

James O. Clark works in a manner that evokes the mad scientist, the visionary tinkerer, and the jazz soloist. At a moment when much sculpture consists of either accumulations of found or “store bought” objects or three-dimensional reprisals of other artists’ work, Clark’s often kinetic sculptures dispel the conformist notion that there is nothing left to do in the artistic arena but to criticize consumerism. Clark appears not to have been affected by much of what happened during the ’80s, either in art or critical discourse. His work neither partakes of this dominant esthetic nor reacts against

print January 1992

Willie Cole

Willie Cole forages through detritus in the form of abandoned household appliances and recombines their parts into totems with unexpected anthropomorphic power. His is an art of recognition, rehabilitation, and revelation; implied in his recastings is a commentary on the ineluctible presence of the human image in virtually everything made by man, including, ironically, the remnants of throw-away culture. Cole looks at a telephone and sees an intriguing sign for the human face, looks at junked blowdryers and imagines an evocative mask; he stacks and reassembles irons and their cords into animated

print December 1991

Nicholas Maffei

Nicholas Maffei’s abiding interest in the relationship between light and dark (both as pictorial fact and as metaphorical presence), coupled with his imaginative articulation of organic forms, suggest the early influence of Bill Jensen more than that of either Minimalism or Pop art. In his recent paintings, however, in which he lays down thick layers of black paint and then scratches through the tarlike surfaces until the white under-painting reveales itself in slightly wavering lines, Maffei has entered a territory all his own.

Like Maffei’s earlier works, the recent compositions are symmetrical

print November 1991

Norman Bluhm

This exhibition, entitled “Norman Bluhm Paintings 1960–65,” not only examines a distinct period in the artist’s career, it affords a fresh view of a moment in post-war American art history, which has been so codified as to render many artists working then almost invisible. As these large canvases attest, Bluhm remains (along with Joan Mitchell) one of the few artists of his generation to have continually grappled with the Abstract Expressionist legacy. Influenced by both Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock (he saw a show of Pollock’s in 1951 ), Bluhm made his first mature abstractions—allover

print October 1991

Jaime Franco

Abstractionists working in a painterly, post-Minimalist manner—an approach that combines a pared-down, abstract vocabulary with either expressive brushwork or Pop art’s theatricality—can be divided into two groups: those who are demonstrating abstraction’s continuing vitality and those who are simply nostalgic for its high-toned rhetoric.

Jaime Franco—a young abstract artist who lives and works in Colombia—is neither reverent nor cynical with respect to achievements of postwar painting. He contributes to abstraction’s renewal without proclaiming himself as either its savior or its liquidator.

print September 1991

David Chow

David Chow’s large, gestural paintings of flowers are neither spin-offs of New Image painting nor are they merely belated nods to the romantic landscape tradition. This is not to suggest that Chow’s work is wholly without precedent, but, rather, that he doesn’t seem to be stymied by looking over his shoulder at the immediate past. In fact, Chow extends both the tradition of painterly expressionism ( particularly the abstract landscapes of Joan Mitchell) and that of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy (he has been studying with a contemporary master for a number of years).

The range of

John Yau