Paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints are included in this exhibition of representative works by some members of the gallery stable. They are Margaret Ash, Leonard Baskin, William Brice, Morris Broderson, Thomas Cornell, William Dole, Rico Lebrun, Miguel Marina, Robert Thomas and Howard Warshaw. Thomas’ new bronzes, cast in his own foundry, at UCSB, are elongated, tapering, tower-like, reliquary forms with subtle turns and twists which spiral upward in Gothic thrusts. Some have crosses affixed, with organic figure images growing out of them like wings, while others seem to fuse into nothingness as they rise in heroic proportions of structural elegance with the quiet simplicity of a Giacometti. They are important works of art and mark a giant step forward in Thomas’ development. Dole’s well-known collages, in a recent series based on a Tower of Babel theme, have become more kinetic, more busy and agitated, with a decided emphasis on blatant rhythmic color sequences. They are more formal and less poetic than before, and have the eclat of something like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Lebrun’s lithograph, Study for Dante’s Inferno, is a powerful configuration of entangled torsos in deep black and a mysterious whitish-grey that seems almost fluorescent or electrically magnetized, and glows in patterns of free, cloud-like shapes that have a primordial, other-wordly, distorted look, oddly relating to Goya’s dwarves or Signorelli’s musclemen. Warshaw shows illustrative fantasies of Alice-in-Wonderland type characters, deformed monsters and studies of heads.
––Arthur Secunda
