print April 1993

Eva Lundsager

Eva Lundsager’s luminous paintings, small oils on wood surfaces, possess a transcendental, almost sublime, quality. The forms in paintings like Really Sips, Leading to the Mass, For a Juicy While, and Playing Field (all works 1992) suggest subjective dreamscapes. Characterized by a quality of light that seems to emanate from its surface and tactile paint, Really Sips employs thin layers of pigment to stir up contradictory feelings of freedom and confinement. Through this white elliptical form, with its multiple rings, and surrounding black and white and colored ground, Lundsager foregrounds the

print February 1993

Chuck Connelly

Perhaps his own best critic, Chuck Connelly declared in 1991, “I am on a journey drenched in paint.” Indeed his recent paintings illustrate his propensity to foreground the properties of oil in rich, tactile, densely packed surfaces that nevertheless complement the detailed imagery of his work.

For example, in Around The Park, 1991, the circular island of greenery—surrounded by a sidewalk filled with people, lanes of cars, and walls of buildings isstretched to its spatial limits through gestural brushstrokes that suggest a distorted angle of perception. Connelly’s preference for darker tones

print January 1993

Abraham Walkowitz

For Abraham Walkowitz art was never less than a religion, and the artistic profession akin to a sacred calling. In 1906 he left New York for Paris, where he fell under the spell of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Henri Matisse, whose work greatly influenced his rendering of the figure.

Walkowitz met Isadora Duncan in Paris, and he was so captivated by her dancing that he made her a central focus of his art. For him, she was the embodiment of the esthetic that drove his work: the notion of the artist as vital creator. Walkowitz was hardly alone in his admiration of Duncan. Numerous artists, from

print December 1992

George Bellows

The first major retrospective of the paintings of George Bellows to be seen in thirty years, this exhibition afforded a welcome opportunity to reassess the work of a leading figure in early 20th-century American art.

Bellows, who was born in 1882 in Columbus, Ohio, moved to New York in 1904, where he studied with the painter Robert Henri, a kind of Hans Hofmann of turn-of-the-century realism whose focus on urban subjects Bellows adopted and used to make his mark. Before he was thirty, Bellows’ career was launched with such paintings as Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909, the first of his wildly popular

print November 1992

Darra Keeton

Darra Keeton’s paintings give lyrical expression to nature, transforming isolated details of landscape into compositions charged with vitality. In the triptych Phrase, 1991, three 15-inch squares are arranged in a horizontal row, each featuring a different, mysterious scene composed of floral and woodsy motifs. These sinewy configurations, enhanced by the gestural treatment of edges and surfaces, create their own internal rhythm, one that reflects both thematic and formal concerns. If the black bulbous shape peering out of the left panel projects a primal energy, the dark clusters in the center

print October 1992

Moon Seup Shim

Moon Seup Shim, one of South Korea’s leading sculptors, belongs to a group of Asian artists who came to international attention during the ’70s, and whose work was viewed in the context of American Minimalism and the related Japanese movement, Mono-Ha. During that period, Shim increasingly centered his work on the relationship between art and nature—employing rocks, found pieces of wood, iron and concrete.

His current series “Wood Deity,” 1987-1991 reflects Shim’s desire to fuse the artist and his work. Like Isamu Noguchi and Richard Serra, he displays a keen understanding of the intrinsic

print October 1992

Mark Wethli

For all their attention to rendering the truth of objective appearance in meticulous detail, Mark Wethli’s paintings of interiors treat form in a highly abstract manner. Working with rooms he encountered in houses on the campus of Bowdoin College, as well as Belaggio, Italy, he demonstrates how the physical dimensions of space can be manipulated to recreate the more intangible spirit, or feeling, of place.

Though the rooms represented in paintings like Under A Northern Sky, 1992, Blue Angel, 1992, Simple Gifts, 1992, and Como, 1991, are always unoccupied, they are suffused with human presence.

print September 1992

Walter Anderson/Arthur Dove

Both Walter Anderson and Arthur Dove can be counted among the scores of 20th-century American artists who have been especially drawn to the medium of watercolor. Each had a distinctive way of using the medium to represent inner truths based on the close observation of nature and the external world. Pairing the celebrated Modernist Arthur Dove with the relatively obscure, Mississippi-based Walter Anderson. this show brought out the formal and thematic affinities between their separate bodies of work.

Anderson’s work evinces a total absorption in the watercolor process, and a sensitivity to the

print Summer 1992

James Winn

James Winn is an artist with a mission: to create a paradisiacal vision of nature. Taking as his focus the Midwest farm belt with its endless cultivated acres topped by broad swatches of sky, he has captured the spiritual side of the outdoors. In a sense, he is pushing the American tradition of transcendental landscape painting, associated with such 19th-century luminaries as George Inness and John Frederick Kensett, into a contemporary arena.

Working in acrylic on paper, Winn has developed a style as rich in detail as it is suffused with feeling. He has managed to be meticulously convincing

print May 1992

Nancy Azara

The old question of whether the artist is the one who chooses the subject or the subject the artist is raised anew in Nancy Azara’s show. For Azara, the “eternal feminine” has long been a preoccupation, and, in her work, this most elusive figure has found a gifted contemporary interpreter. Eschewing literary representation, she renders this subject abstractly, employing rich physical properties and imagistic associations to suggest her various aspects and guises.

This group of carved, painted, and gold-leafed reliefs brings to mind sacred objects used to celebrate the “goddess” in both Western

print April 1992

Julio Larraz

While there are certain subjects, from Latin American dictators to still-life-like interiors, that recur in Julio Larraz’s paintings, he has long been known for the refreshingly expansive range of thematic concerns he has cultivated.

Several paintings from earlier shows that continue to linger in my memory include Four Lobsters in a Tub, 1984, a fabulous red picture made eerily poignant by a single claw that peeks over the side of an enormous pot; Mayday, 1987, a symbolic figurative composition featuring an elderly blond woman, in a big black-rimmed sun hat, standing with a group of military men

print March 1992

Jane Wilson

Jane Wilson grew up in the heart of the Midwest farm belt, and, for her, nature has long been a subject suffused with meaning. After a requisite stint painting in an Abstract Expressionist style during the ’50s, she turned to gestural landscapes in the early ’60s; she has subsequently developed the genre into a personal vehicle of investigation, exploring the complex correspondences between form and feeling. This show of truly sublime landscape paintings will undoubtedly enhance Wilson’s already fine reputation.

American Light, 1991—a powerful work bringing together the objective face and inner

Ronny Cohen