print March 1998

Bjarne Werner Sørensen

If the work of the Danish painter Bjarne Werner Sørensen, steeped in formalist painting traditions, appears to pay homage to the likes of Brice Marden and Per Kirkeby, the ambitious Spring till Fall, Faroes, 1996, makes it clear that the painter is after something other than an engagement with art history. This large work consists of 700 photographs—35-millimeter snapshots, really—methodically arranged in rows depicting events, people, and sites in the Faeroe Islands, and, as the title indicates, spanning three seasons. Sørensen spent a good part of his formative years shuttling back and

print January 1997

Dawn Ladd

This impressive solo show of recent work by New York–based Dawn Ladd revealed an artist with a singular flair for turning industrial materials into richly suggestive forms. Ladd’s metal assemblages comprise a variety of agricultural implements including blades, pipes, axles, and chains, which are illuminated from within so that rays of light emanate from cracks and joints as if these sculpted pieces were animated by their own life force.

Whether they take the form of hanging metal shields or lit wall pieces that could almost double as lamps, these works not only transform familiar objects but

print Summer 1996

Peggy Cyphers

The 70-by-50 inch canvases that comprised Peggy Cyphers’ most recent show were not only the largest but the most impressive of the works she has exhibited in recent years. Her intense exploration of the language of expressionism over the last decade has reached a new height in these works. Her most recent paintings combine abstraction and figuration to lyrical effect, and many of her titles suggest an allegorical dimension.

Onto a ground of gesso tinted a pale yellow, Cyphers silk-screened owls, birds, lizards, and images of women from the ’60s against a central grid, then partially painted over

print November 1995

Hunt Slonem

Characterized by a luscious handling of oils, Hunt Slonem’s recent paintings depict the exotic birds that he collects and that share his downtown studio. The paintings are at once abstract and representational: the multiple grids recall the bars of the bird cages; and the birds themselves are simultaneously recognizable forms and moments of pure color. Slonem creates rich, luminous compositions that are not only a source of visual pleasure, but also reflect his long-standing preoccupation with the natural world as a site of spiritual transcendence.

Each element of Slonem’s work—the interlocking

print Summer 1995

G. Daniel Massad

G. Daniel Massad’s still lifes depict strangely beautiful quotidian objects set against seemingly impenetrable black backgrounds, their textures and shapes illuminated by a subtle play of light. Massad, clearly a master of the genre, does not plumb this tradition to suggest the comforts of domesticity, rather, he infuses both his subject matter and what surrounds it with a sense of the weight of history, of the corrosive effects of time. The jagged, well-worn edges of the stone ledges on which his forms rest in works such as Things Left Behind, 1993, Shelter to Grow Ripe, 1994, and I Walk In

print November 1994

Ying Li

Ying Li’s lush abstractions reflect the sheer pleasure she takes in the process of painting. For Li, painting is a symbol of freedom of expression. Born in Beijing, she became interested in painting in the Western tradition as a child, but because of the Cultural Revolution she spent her teens doing agricultural labor in the countryside. With her return to the city and school, she began painting in oil and did some work in the Chinese social-realist vein that she summed up by saying, “You did what they told you to.”

Upon moving to the New York area in the ’80s, Li began to stress the importance

print September 1994

Kyung-Lim Lee

Kyung-Lim Lee investigates the legacy of abstraction through the filter of Asian and American cultures. The paintings and drawings in her most recent show reflected a concern with series and process, but they also depended on her appropriation of Chinese characters. For works such as Circle and Ellipse #2, 1993, Ellipse #1, 1991, and Trapezoid, 1991, Lee began with a Chinese-Korean dictionary, selecting ten characters of the ten-stroke type. Working with the written Chinese and its direct Korean translation, she set about exploring the meaning of each character from a personal perspective,

print May 1994

DeLoss McGraw

DeLoss McGraw, a San Diego–area artist, presents ardent fantasies about everyday reality. In his recent show “California Gothic,” McGraw spins tales of life in a cul-de-sac—his own slightly altered version of those residential neighborhoods to which there is only one entrance. Del Mar Heights and Walnut Creek, like other places cited in the titles, are the names of two of the many communities of this sort in the state. Using the form of these neighborhoods as a figure of enclosure, McGraw weaves together themes of magic and mystery.

McGraw’s cul-de-sacs are paradaisical places where love blooms

print January 1994

Martha Meyer Erlebacher

While Martha Mayer Erlebacher has certainly studied the history of art, and has looked hard at the rich tradition of allegorical painting, she is neither a neo-Classicist nor a rigid adherent of any theory of contemporary narrative painting. Instead she is guided in her treatment of form and content by a firm belief that, as she has said on occasion, “the human experience is the proper subject matter of art.”

Erlebacher, unlike some of her contemporaries, allows herself to vary her technique. Compared with her meticulous applications of a few years ago, the brushwork employed here was relatively

print December 1993

Nancy Olivier

Nancy Olivier treats painting and drawing as equals rather than as elements in a strict hierarchy. In this show, Olivier used quite a large stretch of wall as well as canvas and paper for her emotionally charged, abstract compositions. Images seemed to separate from surfaces, to propel forms and their contents outside the viewer’s perceptual boundaries.

In Night Light, 1993, an eight-by-twelve-foot wall painting, bustling linear networks traverse a muted ground, enhancing the ceaseless movement of the gestural shapes. This work is suggestive of the process of recognizing the patterns and structures

print November 1993

Catherine Stine

Catherine Stine reenergizes the genre of landscape painting, transforming it into a medium of active engagement that reflects a deep concern with the earth’s survival. In Rainforest Fire, 1992, forms accrete in crisscrossing and heaving painterly passages suggesting the interdependency of vegetal, mineral, and animal. What appear, at first glance, to be simply parts of leaves, plant stems, and stalks metamorphose, upon more sustained scrutiny, into flames and marine creatures. Stine’s descriptive style becomes a metaphor for natural diversity even as she negotiates the tension inherent to the

print May 1993

Isabel Bishop

While by no means a retrospective, this show of selections from Isabel Bishop’s “The Walking Pictures” (a series of paintings ranging from the ’60s to the ’80s) and of drawings and prints, offered a revealing look at Bishop’s vision of 20th-century New York life. Like her fellow student Reginald Marsh at the Art Students’ League, Bishop was determined to use everyday subjects. And like him, she was also attracted to the bustling street scenes of New York. For her focus she chose Union Square which by the late ’20s, with the construction of the subway, had become not only a main transportation

Ronny Cohen