Three Short Takes on Painting Exhibitions in New York

by John Mendelsohn

Bobbie Oliver, RV Grey/Green, Orange, Pink, 2023 acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in.
Photo: KC Crow Maddux / courtesy of the artist and High Noon Gallery
Bobbie Oliver, RV Grey/Green, Orange, Pink, 2023 acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in. Photo: KC Crow Maddux. Courtesy of the artist and High Noon Gallery

The paintings of Bobbie Oliver have undergone a transformation. They have moved from monochrome to full-color, and from clouds of troubled washes to more defined shapes floating in humid atmospheres. The revolution in Oliver’s work goes beyond the formal – it is attitudinal, with the emergence of a complex of moods.

The four large paintings in the exhibition are six-feet tall, with strong passages on the left and right that open up to a central emptiness. The canvas surfaces are painted in a variety of tones, from soft pink to a range of subtly warmer and cooler grays. The grays evoke the colors of aged paper, while passages of diffused pigment suggest an affinity of Oliver’s work with the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, in which form is continually dissolving into space.

On top of the nearly neutral grounds are suspended blocky forms in fluorescent orange and yellow, and in highly saturated turquoise and pink. The forms variously recall signs of urban life such as road repairs and graffiti. There are echoes of earlier pictographic practices such as Mayan glyphs and Chinese seals.

Bobbie Oliver, RV Grey, Blue, Pink, 2023 acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in.
Photo: KC Crow Maddux / courtesy of the artist and High Noon Gallery
Bobbie Oliver, RV Grey, Blue, Pink, 2023 acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48 in. Photo: KC Crow Maddux / courtesy of the artist and High Noon Gallery

Transparent clouds of black pigment pass over the vivid shapes like disturbing thought or diesel exhaust. The fugitive forms suggest organic life, magnified, passing across a microscope slide. Oliver’s is an improvisational art, laying down forms, flooding them with water, allowing blotted color to appear in the wash, only to dissipate.

In the exhibition are four smaller works, which share many of the elements of the larger ones. However, here they are concentrated in the paintings’ centers with a few large entities filling our view.

The overall effect of the paintings, both larger and smaller, is a kind of joyful melancholy which recognizes that phenomena arising and passing away encompass many things – the weather, the city, the art of painting, and our life and times.

Bobbie Oliver: Found Objects. High Noon Gallery, 124 Forsyth Street, New York. March 7-April 21, 2024

Dana Gordon, Maze-L Tov, 2023, oil on canvas, 60x72 in.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Dana GordonMaze-L Tov, 2023, oil on canvas, 60×72 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Dana Gordon’s exhibition of twenty-eight paintings, all from 2023, is too much. We are asked to navigate many walls of paintings that seem to slowly progress from one related mode to another. Why so many paintings? We could hazard a few guesses: the artist as obsessive completist, or as chronicler of his own productivity. Despite the challenge it may present the viewer, the best reason for the plethora of work is witness a painter’s progress – finding his way by impulse and invention, to some unanticipated place.

Early on, the paintings move in this sequence: first, fields of jangly, black linear gestures on white grounds, that then become arrays of colored lines, again on white. In both cases, the thick, brushed strokes do not touch, but move around each other like touchy guests at a cocktail party. These are energized, anxious marks, too charged to coalesce – distant relatives of Keith Haring’s graphic, social bacchanals.

Dana Gordon, Ariadne's Thread, 2023, oil on canvas, 60x72 in.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Dana GordonAriadne’s Thread, 2023, oil on canvas, 60×72 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

In their next phase, the colored lines become thicker, and begin to cross over each other many times, creating a dense tangle on patterned and then solid colored grounds, suggesting an anarchic play on Paul Klee. Then something interesting happens at painting eighteen in the exhibition – the restless, impatient brushstrokes take on a new deliberateness and solidity. The structure is labyrinthine, suggesting that a path out of life’s coils might somehow be possible.

The last turn in the exhibition is the simplest and most satisfying. The layered, competing lines have been combed smooth into a new order of discrete, concentric triangular webs. Resembling plowed fields crisscrossed by diagonal roads, these final seven works have a kind of resolution that is both formal and emotional. The blunt, brash attack is still there, but it is at the service of something that feels like hard-won grace.

Dana Gordon: Signs of Life. Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street, New York. February 3-24, 2024

Bill Pangburn, 7 Drawings #1, 2009, watercolor and gouache, 80x40 in.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Bill Pangburn7 Drawings #1, 2009, watercolor and gouache, 80×40 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Bill Pangburn’s woodcuts, monoprints, and paintings on paper all evoke a watery world of perpetual movement. Sinuous lines suggest the liquid movements of undulating, streaming, and cascading. The fluid imagery offers a variety of ways to contemplate that which never stays still, and moves through and around the solid and the fixed in nature and in us, as well.

There are several distinct modes of Pangburn’s art in this exhibition, curated by Soojung Hyun. The large woodcuts are striking in their size and complexity. Typically, a dense ground of finely-detailed shapes or striations is riven by snaking black lines. In some of the prints, the shapes become gnarly and agitated. We sense the play of rippling water with bright reflections, and deep shadows. There is an ominous feeling that in these highly graphic images, nature is showing us how delight and danger are inextricably woven together.

Bill Pangburn, Jaguars Love to Swim, 2024, woodcut, 67x32 in.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist
Bill Pangburn, Jaguars Love to Swim, 2024, woodcut, 67×32 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

In twined, large-scale reduction woodcuts, with a narrow vertical format favored by the artist, fine lines with bulbous serrations create streaming fields. Figure and ground, in black and silver, are constantly changing identity. All of Pangburn’s black and white prints, with their intense, almost narrative quality, bring to mind the appropriation of art nouveau by the graphic artists of the psychedelic 1960s.

There are three series of work that employ the arabesque. A color relief monoprint displays interpenetrating vine-like curves in mottled indigo on a field of pale lines. Smaller works with tangled lines evoke both the island of Crete, and the currents of the Hudson River.

Among the strongest works in the exhibition are three large watercolor and gouache paintings on paper. Deep blue, thick and powerful lines connect us with the Five Elements of the exhibition’s title. In the Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing, wood, fire, earth, metal, and water embody the cosmic energy manifested in nature. In these works, we feel the writhing of dragons, the labyrinths of the psyche, and the flowing waters of the world.

Five Elements: Bill Pangburn’s Rivers. Artego Gallery, March 1–30, 2024. 32-88 48th Street, Queens, New York

Six Short Takes on Painting Exhibitions in New York

by John Mendelsohn

Dennis Hollingsworth, “extreme gospel”, 2017, oil on canvas, 30x20 in.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Dennis Hollingsworth, “extreme gospel”, 2017, oil on canvas, 30×20 in.. Photo courtesy of the artist

Perplexing, ingratiating, tricky – the paintings of Dennis Hollingworth are all these things and more. Most of the paintings in this exhibition date from 2016-2017, and will introduce some viewers to this intriguing artist’s work, last seen in in New York in 2019.

Hollingsworth primarily uses text in these works as a painterly motif and a cryptic language. A series of large words are stacked, elongated, turned inside out and backwards, and hung out to dry. The words take on a physical presence in thick relief, having been masked and painted on bare canvas, accompanied by fragments of patterns, and multicolored skeins of pigment.

The words exist on the edge of comprehensibility, as if we are hearing pressured speech or a transmission compromised by impinging forces. There is an aspect to this work that suggests concrete poetry or asemic writing. The former asserts the primacy of graphic form as means to convey poetic meaning. The latter uses the gestural qualities of writing as an abstract language in itself.

Both of these forms point to the central doubt in Hollingsworth’s work, a questioning of how or if language can communicate. With the words themselves windblown and torqued, they are like messages that cannot quite be grasped, but emphatic in their insistence in being heard.

Dennis Hollingsworth: Letters to the Future. Helm Contemporary, 132 Bowery, New York. December 15, 2023 – January 19, 2024

David Rhodes, 11 April 2023, 2023, acrylic on raw canvas 23x15 in.
Photo courtesy of the artist and High Noon Gallery
David Rhodes, 11 April 2023, 2023, acrylic on raw canvas 23×15 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and High Noon Gallery

David Rhodes paints stripes in black and white. This bare description is both true and not true, in that it is what we see, and that it is not all that is there. This artist’s work is both physically embodied in black pigment on raw canvas and philosophically an enquiry into what constitutes the experience of a painting.

Within the strictures of diagonal lines of varying thicknesses, Rhodes allows patterns, rhythmic movement, and optical afterimages to emerge. The lines themselves are taped to a hard edge, but glitches occur, with minor bleeds and skips allowed to stand. At Helm Contemporary the paintings have dense, zigzagging, miss-matched sections, leaving us with the frisson of what should, but does not fit. And at High Noon the paintings, dominated by black, have a central, vertical black stripe – an empty zone, the void that cannot be filled, except by our own sense of rupture or relief.

The implacable quality of these paintings, with their uncompromising commitment to a singular vision, bring to mind the work of Clifford Still. The connection goes beyond the jagged forms, at times mountain-like and imposing, and rather suggests a similar existential journey, following a path inscribed in oneself that leads further and further into a spaciousness.

David Rhodes: Aletheia. High Noon Gallery, 124 Forsyth St., New York. January 18 – March 3, 2024

David Rhodes: Partita. Helm Contemporary, 132 Bowery, New York. January 26 – March 1, 2024

Mario Naves, The Hallelujah Crowd, 2023, acrylic on panel, 30x24 in.
Photo: Adam Reich / courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery
Mario Naves, The Hallelujah Crowd, 2023, acrylic on panel, 30×24 in. Photo: Adam Reich / courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Mario Naves paints paintings. That is to say he aspires to make works that embody a kind of aesthetic resolution and solidity. In this intention he stand apart from the heady, supercharged possibilities that abstract painting currently offers. And in this there is a harking back to modernist models – think here about the work of Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth, and other painters of modern life, with the mechanistic and the graphic becoming worthy subjects of the artist.

But for Naves, the life he reflects seems infused with the technological, with its sheer surfaces that facilitate the seamless locking together of form and function. The facture is smooth and screen-like, with the shapes conforming to a kind of free-form geometry, a painterly choice that keeps any potential psychological mess at bay.

Yet at the heart of this work is a mystery. The curving shapes suggest silhouetted identities and personal scenarios that are encoded within the formal matrix. Disjunctive motifs – disks, stripes, flat vistas of color – are layered together, as if experience cannot be just one thing, but must always be various and contingent. The palette is bold, ranging from sonorous, saturated color to low down, unsaturated hues, and often with an insistent darkness as a recurring presence.

Mario Naves: Gratitude and Expectations. Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 W. 20th St, New York. January 6-February 17, 2024

William Carroll, City 54, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 11x14 in.
Photo: Adam Reich / courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery
William Carroll, City 54, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 11×14 in.
Photo: Adam Reich / courtesy of Elizabeth Harris Gallery

William Carroll is a walker in the city, specifically New York, and what he notices is what we see in his small-scale paintings. Working in transparent brushstrokes, primarily in tones of gray, or in two colors, he depicts vignettes of urban life. This is the perennial city, not the leviathan of glass-clad towers, but the unchanged town of rusted bridges, old churches, and empty bill boards with their bare scaffolding.

There is a persistent melancholy here, in the restrained tonalities and the unpeopled scenes of rooftops, power plants, and apartment buildings. In this focus, Carroll shares a poetic kinship with Edward Hopper, with their shared interest in the infrastructure of the city as a kind of surreal stage set which might hold the stories of the isolated and the dispossessed.

Carroll’s images are washy, with a direct, home-grown quality that sits at an angle with his minimalist sense of structure and reductive form. There is as well a gritty lightness at work here, a claiming of the modest and personal as having a place in the life of the metropolis. The paintings of the upper reaches of the city’s towers, each in two sherbet-like colors, are buoyant images that hint at the fulfillment that life there can also promise.

William Carroll: Living in the City. Elizabeth Harris Gallery, 529 W. 20th St, New York.
January 6-February 17, 2024

Harriet Korman, Untitled,  2022, oil on canvas, 24x30 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Harriet Korman, Untitled,  2022, oil on canvas, 24×30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York

In her exhibition, Portraits of Squares, Harriet Korman (full disclosure: my spouse), extends her pursuit of painting that is abstract and structured, but activated by color and by the feeling that we are encountering a consciousness at work. Here are ten recent works, all 24×36 in., made of intuitive, hand-painted geometric forms, with the emphasis on a single square. One canvas from 1979 is also being shown. In the work from the last two years, the square is set within a matrix which varies from concentric bands, to a grid of squares and rectangles, to a perspectival vortex. The square that is the subject of each “portrait” is thus both an independent entity with its own character, and emergant from the life which engendered it.

The mood in these works is by turn introspective and declarative, with a willingness to let the works’ basic elements take the artist on a trip to the inner life of geometric painting. There we sense distant echoes of ancestors: Mondrian and Albers, traditional quilts, and other, older forms of abstraction. But what is most compelling is that with the plain means at hand – resonant color and formal composition – this artist has created a visual fugue that unfolds like music.

Harriet Korman: Portraits of Squares. Thomas Erben Gallery, 526 W. 26th St., New York. January 18 – March 2, 2024

Daniel Rosenbaum, Spirit Guide, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 86x72 in.
Photos courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC; © 2024 Daniel Rosenbaum
Daniel Rosenbaum, Spirit Guide, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 86×72 in. Photos courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC; © 2024 Daniel Rosenbaum

“Psychedelic” is a word that lately is much in the air, particularly in regard to the therapeutic use of psychoactive substances. It carries forward the traditional practice of mind-expansion via hallucinogenics that re-emerged in the 1960s. Daniel Rosenbaum’s paintings feel like they are part of this perennial, conscious-raising project. His vehicle is just paint on canvas, and the faith that abstraction is like a drug that goes right to brain, bypassing rational thought.

Rosenbaum’s paintings in this two-part exhibition range from works that evoke figural imagery to purely abstract engagements. Throughout are flowing currents of visual energy – rippling linear patterns that create nests of involuted loops and liquid unfurlings. We sense that the mutable nature of paint and Rosenbaum’s physical immersion in it constitute the works’ central drama. A painting’s image arises both spontaneously, and with the visible direction of the artist’s hand. Paint streams and pools, and moves with gestural writhings, becoming in itself a kind of animated body.

The body appears literally in a number of the paintings, including a comet/human hybrid, an archangel with reaching wings, and figures from a Renaissance painting. In two abstract canvases, each about 7-feet tall, Rosenbaum is able to expand his vision of cascading floods of color, which through sensitive layering take on an almost topographical presence, to evoke a watery realm and an airborne spirit.

Daniel Rosenbaum: Inner Guardians, Outer Explorers. Woodward Gallery, 132A Eldridge St. and Down Town Association, 60 Pine St., New York. January 12 – March 31, 2024

Spotlight on Thomas Ackermann

by Roy Bernardi & Jennifer Leskiw

Thomas Ackermann, I Love M Matisse, 1984, oil and beeswax on canvas, 66”X66"
Thomas Ackermann, I Love M Matisse, 1984, oil and beeswax on canvas, 66”X66″

Thomas Ackermann was born in Bad Hersfeld, Germany in 1952. As a child his first major influence was a set of Bibles his mother received in trade when Thomas was just four years old. Within the Bibles were illustrations by the Old Masters, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Jacob Jordaens, to name a few. Thomas became enthralled with the illustrations he constantly viewed in the Bibles. 

The Ackermanns immigrated to Canada in 1964 where Thomas continued his studies. As a young adult Thomas enrolled in the New School of Art as it was then called, in Toronto, Ontario. The New School of Art was an academic school under the tutelage of Dennis Burton, Robert Markle, Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rainer, David Bolduc and John MacGregor, all of which had achieved artistic success within the art world of Canada. Out of a class of 20 art students, Ackermann was the only graduate that would go on to pursue and sustain a career as a successful full-time artist. 

Thomas Ackermann, Cedar Lake Ritual, 2022 oil on canvas 55"x60"
Thomas Ackermann, Cedar Lake Ritual, 2022, oil on canvas. 55″x60″

Inspired by the famous Canadian Group of Seven, renowned for their dramatic landscapes of Ontario’s northern reflections, Thomas Ackermann worked in a spontaneous and improvisational manner focused on creating his own painting style. While the aforementioned generation drew their inspiration from the all too familiar landscapes, Ackermann was greatly influenced by the abstract style of action painting. Artists like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko became the staple of New York Abstract Expressionism. In Canada there was Harold Town, William Ronald, Ray Mead, Tom Hodgson, Kazou Nakamura, Walter Yarwood, Jock MacDonald, Alexandra Luke, Oscar Cahen, Hortense Gordon and Jack Bush, who formed the Painters Eleven.  That generation introduced abstract action painting to Canada in the 1950’s, influenced by what was transcending in New York City from the New York Abstract Expressionists.  

Ackermann experimented with images taken from the Impressionists and modern artists and incorporated those images with the influences of the New York Expressionists. By using his own methods and techniques, he would completely transform the image by assimilating the two styles.  Early works such as “I Love M. Matisse” (1984, oil and beeswax on canvas 66” x 66”) and “Curtain Call for a Flag 1” (1984, oil and beeswax on canvas 80” x 80”) took an inspired Henri Matisse “Blue Nude” cut out image and merged it with a Willem de Kooning “Women in Landscape” image creating an assimilation of the two styles on a William Ronald backdrop. 

More recent works such as “Bacchanal on Cedar Lake” (2022 oil and beeswax on canvas 55” x 60”) and “Cedar Lake Ritual” (2023 oil and beeswax on canvas 55” x 60”) where the central figures are inspired by Matisse’s “The Dance” (1910, oil on canvas) were juxtaposed over a backdrop manipulation of Tom Thomson’s “The West Wind” (1917, oil on canvas) thus forming a dramatic combination.  The former, a night vision with the crescent moon lighting up the dancing figures and the latter, a cloudy day vision of the dancing figures under a burning tree. 

Thomas Ackermann, Northland, 2022, oil on canvas, 48″x76″

Another recent example is “Northland” (2022, oil and beeswax on canvas 48” x 76”) where he places a central figure inspired by Canadian artist Ken Danby’s “At the Crease” (1972 oil on canvas) juxtaposed over a Rorschach backdrop manipulation of Tom Thomson’s “The West Wind” (1917 oil on canvas). Ackermann often appropriates iconic images readjusting their history into his own poignant point of view. He continuously uses an inspired image in different combinations until he has exhausted its usage.

As a painter for more than 50 years Ackermann has endeavoured to elicit a visceral experience from his paintings to the viewer. His interest is not about the motif or images used as the central focal point but more so the process of transforming the painted surface with his unique manipulation of his medium, the oil paint, thus creating a physically, stunning painting. Ackermann quoted “Half of my subject is the painting itself.” He developed a unique way of applying materials onto the canvas, in spirit, much like Jackson Pollock or Helen Frankenthaler, dripping or pouring. Ackermann uses a 600 year old medium such as oil paint, mixed with beeswax, allowing flexibility to the integrity of the paint and re-invented or altered it to suit his own unique process. He is constantly altering his methods to discover new ways and techniques in which to express his vision. His works are either highly reflective, without topical varnishes, or extremely rough and textured. In his later and more recent works, a brush has not touched the final surface.  

Thomas Ackermann, Le Dejeuner Sur L’une, 2017, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 65"x52"
Thomas Ackermann, Le Dejeuner Sur L’une, 2017, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 65″x52″

Like many of his peers, Ackermann worked through a series of developmental phases or stages influenced by his surroundings.  He began in Toronto, Ontario, moved to Spain, returned to Canada, and finally settled in the small rural town of Forest, Ontario. He has worked through different influential periods beginning with “Figurative Abstractions” (1973-1988). then transitioning to his “Spanish Paintings” during his residency in southern Spain (1988-1994).  From there, on his return to Canada to Forest, Ontario, he commenced his transformation into his “Qabala” series (1994-2000).  Constantly moving forward, Ackermann created “The Card Paintings”, an ambitious body of work at a grandiose scale from any previous works (2002-2004). Following this, he transitioned to works predominately on paper mounted to canvas with his “Target-ID” images taken from portraiture. He produced an oeuvre based on a photograph of “A Portrait of Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin”.  This photograph was taken by his fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong, showing Aldrin standing on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.  By using historical and biblical imagery, one sees reflections on the astronaut’s helmet face-shield/visor creating his “Astronauts” series (2007-2009). 

In later years, Ackermann became discouraged with the academics of the art world. He turned to his dark period producing a series of paintings titled “Dead Men Standing”, “The Gates of Hell” and “Fukushima”.  Here he stumbled upon a new technique that would transform his work for the next several years and which has continued to this day. This discovery consisted of placing a high grade acrylic film called Duralar over an image, than peeling it off and repositioning it on a fresh canvas.  This created a soluble transfer which allowed him to not only paint one image but to transfer it to other canvases creating paintings from one master image.  Ackermann further discovered that the longer he left the high grade acrylic film cover on the painting, the more plastic in nature the surface would become, and remain to the point where the surface looked as if the image was behind plexiglass, when in fact it is the actual paint surface. One only needs to look at the surface of any one of his paintings to visually see the quality and aspects of the applied oil paint to the canvas revealing the genius of a true master. 

Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette

by D. Dominick Lombardi

Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette, the current exhibition at Overlap gallery in Newport, RI, features intricate collaged drawings, mixed media sculptures and paintings. Installed in a variety of configurations and formats, everything here suggests the peripheral representations one stores as secondary memory, the kind of imagery that might be spawned by subconscious prompts throughout the five senses. Within all this, there appears to be an overwhelming focus on the tactile quality of this mentally stored minutiae, details that keep all the visual effects fluid and stimulating without being too definitive or easily recognizable.

Maggie Nowinski, Somaflora Specimen – Friend or Foe I, 2023, Pen and ink and gouache on heavyweight Stonehenge paper, 28 x 42 inches
Maggie Nowinski, Somaflora Specimen – Friend or Foe I, 2023, Pen and ink and gouache on heavyweight Stonehenge paper, 28 x 42 inches

This series of works began during COVID when studio time for visual artists was unencumbered by social gatherings, work, or just plain “things to do.” Spanning over two years of detailed combinations of divergent imagery, materials and intentions, the approach of Nowinski and Renadette is very much like the 1925 Surrealist parlor game, Exquisite Corpse, where artists added strange, unrelated drawings on the same piece of paper, and always in sequential order. In this instance, with Exquisite Variants, there is more of a back and forth between the two artists who find common ground in an aesthetic that speaks of the inner-worldly. Overall, the imagery is tinged with Surrealist undertones that combine biomorphic forms, indications of technology, manufacturing debris and unlikely transitions all enhanced by a very wild and wily palette.

Alicia Renadette, Communion, 2022-2023, Easter Bunny suit, Grandmother’s tablecloth, artificial flowers, craft felt, Easter grass, ribbon, fabric, embroidery floss, pipe cleaners, bubble wands, wire, 48 x 48 x 28 inches
Alicia Renadette, Communion, 2022-2023, Easter Bunny suit, Grandmother’s tablecloth, artificial flowers, craft felt, Easter grass, ribbon, fabric, embroidery floss, pipe cleaners, bubble wands, wire, 48 x 48 x 28 inches

What I find most intriguing about this exhibition is the way the exhibition ebbs and flows visually and viscerally through the use of certain repetitive details found in both the two and three dimensional objects. Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (2023) covers the largest wall of the gallery, driven by seemingly endless, individual, collaged ink drawings and mixed media sculptures that set in motion an evolving, multiplying, expanding organism. A potent structure of energetic expression built upon meditative mark-making and inward searching.

Maggie Nowinski & Alicia Renadette, Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (detail), 2023, Mixed media installation
Maggie Nowinski & Alicia Renadette, Exquisite Realm: Scanning the Substrata (detail), 2023, Mixed media installation

In the worst times of the COVID pandemic, there was an overall fog of life, of not knowing how bad it would get, if you were its next victim, or if there would ever be light at the end of the tunnel. So it is not so surprising that anxiety levels would increase throughout the globe under such overwhelming stress. For whatever reason, artists have an innate ability to employ that negative energy into their work by channeling the flow of lines, shapes and colors from the subconscious, enabling them to represent the illusive space between survival and dread.

Exquisite Variants: Maggie Nowinski and Alicia Renadette ends September 10th. For more information visit the gallery’s website https://www.overlapnewport.com/

Eric Sanders: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum

by Steve Rockwell

Eric Sanders, 10 Million Dollar Baby, 2023, acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas, 19 x 16 Inches
Eric Sanders, 10 Million Dollar Baby, 2023, acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas, 19 x 16 inches

In his June, 2023 Tokyo Metropolitan Museum solo exhibition Eric Sanders tackles themes of time, history, and timelessness by directly referencing photographer Eadweard Muybridge. By 1887 Muybridge had become one of the most influential photographers of his time, driving both artist and scientist to examine the nature of movement more closely. Through his technique of “freezing” human and animal locomotion, photographers might depict movement as a series of still images, and importantly, unleash the potential of motion pictures. Sanders and and his “Star Walkin’ 7” painting neatly covers this historic reference by printing the familiar sprocket holes of a film strip, here depicting images of his wife Anna walking.

Eric Sanders, Star Walkin’ 7, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 inches
Eric Sanders, Star Walkin’ 7, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Sanders emphasizes “freeze-framing” by combining body movement and liquid immersion. In “Blinding Lights (1)” it’s a yellow splash, the body falling backward, a screen image of the figure uniting with paint into a split second freeze, as if fossilized in amber for eternity. The moment is an example of the heads-or-tails coin of time, with “heads’ it’s now, and “tails” forever – a reminder that a milli-second cannot be severed from countless millennia.

Eric Sanders, Nude Descending Staircase No. 2, 2023, acrylic on canvas stretched panel, 60 x 40 inches

Gerhard Richter’s “Woman Descending the Staircase” is directly referenced by Sanders in his “Nude Descending Staircase,” here the angle of the stairs resembling the railroad track to infinity schematic, sometimes used in illustrating perspective and spatial depth. The hooded, but otherwise nude, figure carries an aura of mystery as she appears in a shroud of mottled yellow and black. It’s impossible to not be reminded of Duchamp’s 1912 “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” giving the Sanders “Nude” a double, but necessary, historic reference. It’s clear that Sanders wishes to “run the table” of art linkages, since Muybridge was first out of the gate.

“In these paintings I engage with, and work against, the traditional artist/muse relationship,” Sanders states. If I read this correctly, the artist wishes to give Anna, his wife, greater self-assurance and independence of spirit than we might normally ascribe to the muse of art history. The cinematic aspect of this group of works rises to the fore, especially when read as a whole, and Anna is clearly its star.

Eric Sanders, Inverted, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 108 x 144 inches
Eric Sanders, Inverted, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 108 x 144 inches

Sanders having limited this work to monochrome palette and suggestive titles in groups of “freeze” images opens up the possibility for the viewer to ascribe filmic possibilities to the exhibition. “Bulls on Parade,” an acrylic and charcoal on canvas, whether suggestive of protagonist or antagonist symbolically, conveys a full-frontal charge of energy towards the viewer. “Blinding Lights” and “Inverted,” are splash and explosion of yellow and magenta respectively, while “Bad Bitch O’clock” a catastrophe of some sort.

Eric Sanders, Electric Love, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
Eric Sanders, Electric Love, 2023, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

A series of small print-based works drew inspiration from Muybridge again, and might serve as staccato punctuations to any work in the 12” x 16” acrylic and lithograph transfer on canvas board series. Each have suggestive titles such as “The Butterfly Effect,” “Way Less Sad,” and “It Ain’t the Same as it Was.” A simple narrative might be: Woman (10 Million Dollar Baby) walks down staircase only to tumble into turbulent water, where she battles an unseen foe. An acrylic and charcoal on canvas titled “Unchained” suggests a rescue with an eventual happy ending through “Electric Love.”

This first international solo exhibition by Eric Sanders is open-ended with a raw edge, capturing something of the background turbulence that culture and society is undergoing at the moment, and should resonate with a viewer from a diversity of points of view.

Eric Sanders Solo Exhibition: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. Opens June 14th, 2023.