print December 1988

Robert Seaver

In this series of untitled still lifes, Robert Seaver displays a profound understanding of the expressive power of things. Working in pastel, a medium known for its rich physical properties, Seaver builds dense and dynamic surfaces and succeeds in bringing out, with enticing results, the palpable dimension of forms. The objects that interest Seaver are representative of the artist’s own wide-ranging esthetic tastes, which span the fields of fine and decorative arts. Some objects, such as the 18th-century French silver coffeepot that figures prominently in one composition, are encoded with

print November 1988

Stuart Frost

Stuart Frost continues to produce one of the more distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American realism. Judging from this retrospective, which spans the years from 1957 to the present, Frost appears to be the kind of artist who is content to follow a course directed by his own expressive needs. Drawing has served as his primary medium since the ’40s. The precise style of rendering that is his trademark owes little to either photorealism or traditional academic realism. For Frost, the world of objective appearance is a starting point, in that he uses its forms as a vehicle to carry us to

print October 1988

Leonora Carrington

In this show of recent paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, all executed since her move to New York in 1986, Leonora Carrington, one of the lesser-known figures of the European Surrealist movement, offered some of her most compelling expressions to date. In all these pieces, Carrington demonstrates a peerless mastery of what might be called visual poetics: the unfolding drama of form that is to be found only in art of the highest level. She reveals an unfettered creativity that is constantly engaged in a passionate search for larger truths.

Carrington’s method is an evocative one. In the

print September 1988

Giancarlo Neri “Nove Lune”

Giancarlo Neri, an Italian artist who has lived in New York for the last nine years, created an outdoor installation of a group of nine recent paintings inspired by meditations on the subject of the moon. The installation invited a fascinating array of thoughts and speculations concerning the role of the artist’s studio in the creative process. Neri’s studio, a back room of a small, walk-up apartment, located on one of the densely packed streets of Greenwich Village, turned out to be an active and integral element in his work, from conception through execution, and, finally, to installation.

print September 1988

James DeWoody

James DeWoody first showed a talent for bringing out the dynamic aspects of form and color in the abstract paintings and sculptures he did between 1972 and 1982. Over the last five years, the lively zigzag patterns and faceted shapes he has favored have started to take on decidedly associative connotations, bringing to mind certain architectural references, such as the tower. DeWoody's vision has tended to develop in a decidedly representational direction, though the key to discerning the symbolic content of his work lies in apprehending its special concrete qualities, insinuated as they are in

print Summer 1988

Judith Shea

Judith Shea is one of a key group of younger American artists who have been exploring the humanistic foundations of sculpture, which lie in the figurative tradition, without resorting to either a slavish imitation of or a radical break with the past. In Between Thought and Feeling, 1988, she succeeds in reinvesting the lap, one of the oldest structures in figurative sculpture, with genuine symbolic weight. Here a bronze sculpture of a headless and armless female figure clad in a tight-fitting sheath sits on a large cast-stone cube, and on her lap is a large bronze bust of a man’s head. The

print Summer 1988

Margery Edwards

Margery Edwards, rather than situating herself in that distant theoretical zone in which painting is burdened down with the weight of calculated conceits, freely explores the suggestive powers of form, color, and light to articulate what appear to be certain truths about our experiences in both urban and natural environments. The two monumental dark forms that dominate compositions such as N.Y. 712, N.Y. 741, N.Y. 742, and N.Y. 743, all 1987, and the way these vertical forms overlap at oblique angles—or sometimes don’t close the gap but leave just a slice of polar field between—recreate for the

print May 1988

Richard Kalina

Richard Kalina’s work uses the vocabulary of Purism, the post-Cubist art developed after World War I by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, as the visual and conceptual springboard for a plastic language very much of his own invention. Purism has often been considered a kind of stylized, conservative offspring of Cubism, a retreat from that movement’s radical approach to reality. Using the classic components of Purism—abstract planar elements, and still-life objects with full geometric forms and smoothly flowing contours—Kalina shows how the style instead embodies a high point in the desire for

print April 1988

Mary Hambleton

Over the last five years, as Mary Hambleton’s paintings have appeared in numerous group shows around town, she has emerged as an artist worthy of our closer attention. Her highly emotive forms have never seemed contrived; instead, they spoke of and for the intellectual integrity underlying her approach to abstraction. In this exhibition of 12 works from 1987—her first solo show—Hambleton displayed the full expressive range of her compelling plastic vision: her powers of composition and graphic descriptiveness, and her ability to charge surfaces—using the texture and weight of oil pigment—with

print April 1988

Nancy Cheairs

In this, her first show in New York, Nancy Cheairs, a painter from Memphis, Tennessee, demonstrated a talent for creating vibrant symbols. Cheairs is gifted with the power to get at life’s truths and express them in bold visual terms.

Her forms and compositions are kept to the essentials. In Procession, 1987, for example, the composition consists of four dresses hung on a clothesline suspended between two trees, which are planted right at the horizon line and framed by a red sky. What comes across at first glance are the painting’s comic overtones, magnified by its large scale, stark frontality,

print March 1988

Armando Morales

Although the Nicaraguan-born artist Armando Morales has spent much time during the last three decades in different locations throughout South America, Europe, and the United States, his true home has remained the realm of the imagination. Judging by the paintings in this recent show, all from 1987, his closest “neighbors” in this dreamlike region are Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Delvaux. Like them, Morales exploits the illusionistic force of painting to shake the usual rock-solid hold that reality has on our senses.

The paintings of figures in landscapes are the most ambitious works shown here.

print March 1988

Charles Pollock

Charles Pollock, the older brother of Jackson Pollock, is now 85, living in Paris and reportedly ailing. Although his work was overshadowed by that of his revolutionary younger brother, there is more than a bit of the rebel about him as well. This was apparent in the group of paintings featured in this recent exhibition, which were done in 1968 and ’69, years in which abstract painting was still dominated by geometric color-field painting. The older Pollock worked in much the same kind of reductive context as such big guns of the ’60s as Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella, but with

print February 1988

Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko was a leading figure of the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde, and one of Modernism’s most vigorous proponents and visionary talents. His work shown here, including drawings that have never been seen in this country before, were obtained through the efforts of Alessandra Latour, curator of this gallery, with the cooperation of Rodchenko’s daughter Vavara Rodchenko, his grandson Alexander Lavrentjev, and the State A. B. Shchusev Architectural Museum in Moscow.

The subject of the earliest drawing in the show, Carnival, 1914, is one that Rodchenko returned to later in his

print February 1988

Vicki Teague-Cooper

In her recent solo show, her first in New York, Vicki Teague-Cooper demonstrates a clear-cut talent for symbolic expression. The artist, who is formerly from Texas, can stir the soul with her haunting vision. Taking a traditional pictorial format, that of the figure in landscape, she has reinvested it with emblematic meaning in the group of new oil paintings and recent charcoal-and-pastel drawings that were shown here.

Each work represents a singular confrontation with the unknown. In the painting Threshold, 1987, a naked figure of androgynous appearance is at the edge of a huge gaping hole in

print January 1988

Nina Beall

In her first solo show in New York, Nina Beall, a young Texas artist now based in Chicago, reveals herself to be a painter in the tradition of the heavily impastoed, expressionistic landscapes of Van Gogh. Like Van Gogh, Beall is thoroughly attuned to the vital rhythms of nature. She brings out their emblematic significance through repetitions of color and shape, while the variations in the planar design of the compositions build pictorial energies to intensely engaging levels of feeling and sensation. So assured is Beall's technique that she succeeds in impressing her vision even on landscape

print January 1988

Larry Brown

Never in the history of art has painting meant more things to more people, with no clear consensus about the means to be used or the ends worth achieving. Such pluralism has contributed to painting's basically healthy state in the late 1980s. The current popular approaches cover a wide range of formal and thematic practices, from the revival of various academic and Modernist styles to an ironic strategy of simulation. This variety of options includes Larry Brown's deeply affirmative approach to painting, based on his belief in the medium as a means of miraculous communication.

Brown's recent show

print December 1987

Vladimir Zakrzewski

Of all the major styles of art from the early 20th-century, the one that seems to have aged the best and lost the least pictorial punch is Constructivism. Constructivism remains a vital tradition that can still inspire abstract art of the highest quality, as shown by this exhibition featuring the recent work of Vladimir Zakrzewski.

Zakrzewski, originally from Poland, has lived in the United States since 1981. His work displays authentic powers of invention, while it expresses the same love of pure form that flowered in his native country in the 1920s and ’30s as an offshoot of Russian Constructivism.

print December 1987

Bruce Cohen

It is possible to divide the world of contemporary art into those who like realism and those who don’t. For those who don’t, realism is commonly regarded as reactionary, and realists and their supporters as the archconservatives of the art world. Realists are interested in the cultivating of technique for the sake above all else of continuing Old Master conventions of representation, the only exceptions being the Photorealists. The latter, on the basis of their elevation of the photographic esthetic—and their concomitant slap in the face to traditional realist taste—have been accepted by certain

print November 1987

Leonardo Cremonini

Many writers—including Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Stephen Spender—have been intrigued by the work of Leonardo Cremonini. The source of his appeal, particularly to those of a philosophical bent, lies in the poetic urgency of his imagery. Although the figures and objects in Cremonini’s paintings are always recognizable, they are often in disconcerting juxtapositions and seem to inhabit eerily empty spaces that suggest unearthly, self-contained worlds. This is especially true of his large canvases such as The End of the Party, 1984–85, The Last Games of Summer, 1984–85, The

print October 1987

Rex Lau

Rex Lau makes paintings that are what the early 20th-century avant-garde called pure plastic equivalents of the real world. His approach strongly recalls the early Modernist tradition of “abstracting nature,” with particular overtones of Cézanne and the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla. The best of the recent paintings that were on view here are works that not only show their connectedness to art-historical sources but also reaffirm the value of personal expression.

Untitled Landscape, 1986, is a small, almost square relief painting of a scene of trees in a forest. The trees are represented by a

Ronny Cohen