print September 1990

Betsy Berne

Betsy Berne’s paintings display an unerring sense of the medium’s divine power to trans-port the viewer into imaginative realms. Her recent paintings seem centered in the most primary of dimensions where the mysteries of existence reveal themselves. In a number of examples including The Deep, 1989, Red Sea, 1989, and Third Party, 1990, the enigmatic style of organic abstraction that has become Berne’s trademark proves well suited to suggesting universal themes of creation.

The Deep, with its glowing black ground and rich atmospheric qualities, conjures up a kind of primordial darkness. Built up

print September 1990

Betsy Kaufman

Betsy Kaufman’s spare abstractions offer stimulating appraisals of that perhaps most crucial dynamic determining not only the visual but the intellectual parameters of abstract painting: the relationship of surface and image. Kaufman handles this dynamic with keen sensitivity to the expressive potentials of both its formal and its thematic components.

The issue of surface is brought to attention first by the starkly declarative frame-in-frame format of the paintings. This format consists of a rectangular colored image surrounded by a white border. Almost immediately the question arises as to

print Summer 1990

Mary Armstrong

Mary Armstrong is a painter who in recent years has continued to mine the rich emblematic ground uniting nature and art. In this group of paintings she reaches new levels of profound expression in her chosen area.

Armstrong seamlessly brings together a complex content and multidimensional form in powerful compositions with startling iconic integrity. She is tuned into the universal psychic or spiritual forces that make themselves known through physical changes in nature. Every aspect of these paintings, from the distinctive frame-in-frame format and the wood-panel surface, to the thick built-up

print Summer 1990

Marianne Stikas

Marianne Stikas succeeds in making the most elemental, and thus the most significant, kind of abstract paintings—the kind that literally get down to the architecture of ideas and feelings that provides the basis for pictorial elaboration.

It is not an exaggeration to claim that Stikas is an artist who knows the lay of pictorial space backward and forward. Notable in these paintings is the clear description of the illusionistic underpinnings of pictorialism. At issue throughout these dynamic compositions is the play of receding and advancing colored form—the relationship of surface to depth.

One

print May 1990

Philip Geiger

By remaining loyal to his own outlook and pictorial inclinations, Philip Geiger, a realist painter in his early 30s, has achieved a heightened level of expression in his recent show. Geiger’s mastery of appearances has become sharper and clearer even as he has honed his ability to seize the moment—to get below the surface and beyond the instant at the more substantial essence of things.

Like Edward Hopper, Geiger is attuned to the poetic dynamic locked beneath the prosaic scenery of 20th-century America. Taking his Charlottesville, Virginia, surroundings as his subject matter, he has provided a

print May 1990

James Winn

Concentrating on the farms and countryside of the Midwest, James Winn has created a group of landscapes that can only be described as glorious. Winn, who was born in the Midwest and lives outside of Chicago, imbues his paintings with a deep-seated sense of what might be called the divine in nature. As he recently explained: “I would like to in some measure share with the viewer that uplifting spiritual presence I sense residing immanent in the land.” To a quite remarkable degree Winn accomplishes this, and he does so by dint of the power of his images to inspire fresh appreciation of the beauty

print April 1990

Bob Thompson

In these works, covering the years 1959 to 1965, Bob Thompson demonstrated how during that most culturally radical of decades, the ’60s, it was possible for a young artist to reinvest the most hallowed symbolic traditions of art with fresh significance. How? By doing what amounted to his own lyrically expressive thing. Thompson’s life was tragically brief; he died in 1966 at age 29. A visionary of a uniquely American sort, he was part of a talented circle including Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, and Larry Rivers that made up the figurative wing of the New York School. Thompson developed a style of

print April 1990

Andrew Stevovich

More than a bit of a romantic, with a touch of the classicist about him, the painter Andrew Stevovich is one reason the field of contemporary figurative realism has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance of late. Stevovich has a genuine flair for symbolic statement, for bringing out life’s metaphorical significance, not in any heavy or didactic fashion but in the most enchanting of terms. In this show of recent paintings Stevovich revealed quite a keen eye for the quiet drama of daily existence. He showed the timeless element behind the commonplace encounter, the elemental forces of love and desire

print March 1990

Barbara Kassel

In this group of recent work drawing on images from Africa and the Middle East, Barbara Kassel revealed her talent for bringing together reality and fantasy into representations fairly brimming with symbolic meaning. She also demonstrated her knack for using the element of appearance as a vehicle of poetic expression. Kassel is a realist who seems to delight in the challenge of making each of her paintings like a complex mirror held up to life—a mirror capable of displaying the usually hidden relationships between the physical and spiritual worlds. Her tightly rendered forms have an intensity

print March 1990

Dina Ghen

Since the early ’80s, Dina Ghen has been producing abstract sculpture rich in metaphorical possibilities. She has developed methods for carving and casting materials such as urethane, epoxy, and resins that enable her to extract from them an amazingly diverse range of formal properties, as well as vast expressive potential. In this exhibition, Ghen showed herself capable of producing serious, elevated sculpture using nontraditional materials, particularly industrial plastics. Her work demonstrates not only the intrinsic beauty of these synthetic substances, but the capacity they have to transcend

print February 1990

Marc Travanti

Marc Travanti shares with the Cubists and Futurists an interest in extending the scope of the picture to accommodate fragments of reality. Using the technique of collage pioneered by Braque and Picasso, Travanti works with newspaper fragments cut out from various American and foreign periodicals. The fragments are glued to solid rectangular supports, most of which are made of wood. Travanti arranges his material in rhythmical passages, with much attention paid to edge and direction, and to what possible impact the words and letters contained in the pieces of columns and headlines carry. This

print February 1990

Liuba

This retrospective, covering the years from 1963 to 1989, provided a long overdue look at the work of a leading international sculptor. Liuba was born in Bulgaria and studied with Germaine Richier in Switzerland in the mid ’40s. Since the late ’50s, she has lived in Paris and São Paulo. Judging by the sculptures and drawings that were displayed here, she is an artist who exhibits a peerless understanding of the expressive dynamics of form. There is something magical about her ability to imbue form with vital meaning. Much the same can be said of her talent for using abstraction as a means to

Ronny Cohen