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Frank Rivera Paintings 16 October - 22 November 2008 In his first solo exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery, Frank Rivera introduces us to his topsy-turvy world of the visual non-sequitur where there is no distinction between the quotidian and the magical. Employing such disparate references ranging from early renaissance predella panels to the underground pulp comics of the eighties to storyboard graphics and computer art, --and with a dash of Dada thrown in, --Rivera engages, and almost challenges the viewer with his cryptic, enigmatic imagery and narratives. With a truly light sleight of hand, he demonstrates for us that nothing is what it seems to be. Rivera has shown in many exhibitions in the New York area, including the Whitney Biennial in 1975.
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Ferdinand Pleines Paintings 4 September - 11 October 2008 Memory is the source from which Ferdinand Pleines creates his paintings. His mid-western world seems almost obsessed by a youthful journey taken with his family to their ancestral home in Germany, where he was born. Memories from there fill Pleines’ world with surrealistic haunting portraits, sometimes couched in relationships with birds and animals. Eye spirits peer out of his painterly landscapes where man and nature are one. Pleines’ highly personal universe seems collaged together, disorienting us, yet at the same time, we are drawn into the composition. Its surface is marked with wide incessant brush strokes soaked in a unique palette, furthering the viewer’s intrigue. The juxtaposition of these images and the surrealistic overtones are compelling, but ultimately we are left wanting to know more. Pleines’ previous exhibitions have taken place in the mid-west. This was his first one man show in New York.
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Thomas Burleson Lone Star II 5 June - 25 July 2008 This was the second one-person exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery of works on paper by Thomas Burleson (1914-1997), a self-taught artist from Texas who produced a substantial body of brilliantly colored works during a thirty-year period. Much of the work was done while the artist was employed as a shipping inspector at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in California, and during his retirement.
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Gladys Nilsson Recent Watercolors 17 April - 31 May 2008 In her first solo exhibition in New York in twenty years, Chicago’s Gladys Nilsson provided a clinic in the art of watercolor. She also brings back with her the zany cast of figures—with their signature Nilsson attitudes and elastic, elongated arms and legs; the cats and birds and creatures and small-scale figures whereby she gently caricatures and choreographs the quotidian and the mundane as the operatic sub-plots in which we all have roles to play. As is frequently the case in Nilsson’s narratives, the main figures in many of the paintings in this exhibition play the roles of the diva; but perhaps characterized with a subtle difference from the whimsical humor and on-target wit with which they were portrayed previously. Here these qualities are tinged with a palpable—though unsentimental--homage to all our prima donnas, a wistful tribute to their steadfastness, courage, and vulnerability. “Brava!”
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Walter Anderson Watercolors and Drawings 19 February - 10 April 2008 Luise Ross Gallery presented its thirteenth exhibition since 1985, when the gallery opened, of Walter Anderson's extensive body of watercolors and drawings. It focused on the artist’s favorite subject, the birds on the Gulf Coast as well as the sea life which share an almost psychological affinity with him. Executed in pencil and pen and ink the aviary and aquatic life are drawn directly from Anderson’s observation. His watercolors are characterized by brilliant color and attitudinal certainty.
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Victor Joseph Gatto "You can't paint this way unless you believe in what you're painting." 5 January - 9 February 2008 At about the age of forty-five, with the encouragement of starving artist neighbors in Greenwich Village’s Little Italy--of which there were many in the late 1930’s--and perhaps out of simple desperation, Gatto began to paint. And he did so the way he lived: hard, aggressively, obsessively. Working in oil, building up layer after layer of paint, brushes tailored for minute detail with most of the hairs pulled out, he worked at his new job full-time and on individual canvases for days at a time without sleep. Obviously self-taught, he gradually developed a reputation as a visionary primitive, painting imagined utopian and biblical subjects and resonant images of New York City. In the early forties, the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased and exhibited one of his paintings. This was followed by his first solo exhibition in 1943 at the Charles Barzansky Gallery on Madison Avenue. Gatto’s work at least, had moved uptown. It has been 65 years since Gatto’s first New York show. The exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery featured a series of his complex utopian visions, alternatives to the gritty world he experienced. Gatto once poignantly said, “I like to paint (outer) space. The material world can hurt you, but in space nobody suffers, and it goes on forever.” Complementing these utopian creations and nature paintings (his inspired jungle oils evoke the spirit of Henri Rousseau with their rich, brooding colors) are rare drawings of brothel scenes, reminiscences from his early years hanging out at a house his elder brother managed. They are touchingly innocent in their simplicity.
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Gail Gregg: Recent Paintings 25 October - 21 December 2007 The abstract artist Gail Gregg has turned for inspiration from the aerial landscape views of recent years to more earthbound and quotidian objects: the virtually unnoticed remnants of our consumer culture. Cardboard packing forms, wine box dividers, plastic packaging of all sorts -- all the stuff that comes with the stuff we buy -- is grist for Gregg’s new paintings. Using the wax-and-pigment medium of encaustic, she transforms these throw-away objects into formal paintings that honor the eccentric forms and patterns of the humble materials. Infused with color—and Gregg is a master colorist -- that is enhanced by the medium’s luminosity, the paintings take on sensuous richness. On one level, with their saturated color and hand-burnished surfaces, these new paintings speak to the possibility of transformation – and to Gregg’s belief that beauty can be found in the unlikeliest of places. On quite another, her wit and gentle irony provoke questions about our culture of consumerism and proclivity to waste. Finally, her quietly formal pictures are animated by references to (and questions about) negative space, geometric pattern and symmetry.
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John Himmelfarb: Ideographic Sequence 6 September - 20 October 2007 This first show for the artist at Luise Ross Gallery is comprised of paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture from 1979 to the present. All are based on the nascent mark making, the integral thread that runs through the evolution of Himmelfarb’s philosophical and artistic preoccupation with calligraphic abstraction. His use of line is key to the emotional communication between artist and viewer--perhaps more so even than between other visual artists and viewer--because the eye is challenged to “read” the texts visually rather than as information which has to be decoded. And this being said, in the more conventional use of the term artistic vocabulary, Himmelfarb’s use of layered colors in the paintings and prints is masterful. Wit, strength, and a touch of restlessness and ambiguity aptly describe the work in this exhibition.
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Rare Birds 5 June - 27 July 2007 Rare Birds at Luise Ross Gallery presents work by thirty-one contemporary artists in which bird imagery or references are integral elements. The exhibition is replete with a stunning variety of media, styles and treatments. It is of “rare” birds in the sense that our feathered friends play supporting roles—to a greater or lesser degree--in the artists’ overall creative intentions and are not, nor meant to be, lifelike reproductions of species à la Audubon. In fact, some are pure invention. Even among apparent exceptions to this, as in Walter Anderson’s faithful watercolor rendering of “Baby Birds,” the viewer sees the importunate vulnerability of all fledglings—of any species. In Roger Ricco’s photographic capture of a hummingbird in flight, we not only hear whirring wings, but feel the racing heartbeat of life. And surely, Toc Fetch’s pencil crow is artfully “real,” and for that, only more comple-mentary to what “Crow Says.” Humor abounds. Gladys Nilsson pays off her expert watercolor caricature of two self-important matrons with equally puffed-up pigeons. TL Solien’s divining dodo, complete with strap-on wings, satirically portends the götterdämmerung of the Pequod’s voyage. Victor Faccinto’s very modern digital assemblage of a contemporary “Shiva” includes the almost casual presence of two songbirds out of the classic South Asian miniature genre, wryly confirming that the battle of the sexes is an age-old tale. Several artists tellingly employ bird imagery that is more enigmatic, even ominous, in its allegorical reference. Ferdinand Pleines’s “Memory Unravels the Truth” is almost Hitchcockian and it rivets the eye. A brace of pheasants, suddenly flushed into flight in a stark, wintry Kansas landscape, serve as a mnemonic for Doug Martin’s “Brain Storm”—a poignant, dreamlike, beautifully painted narrative of a past Christmas memory. Rare birds, indeed.
Participating Artists
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Thomas Lyon Mills: 10 1/2 Maps 19 April - 25 May 2007 From a dreamlike vantage at the fantastic intersection of the hidden wetlands of the Adirondacks and the subterranean catacombs of Rome, Thomas Lyon Mills creates expansive and mysterious amalgamations of observations and visions in his second solo exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery. Evoking organic atmospheres appreciated through contemplative solitude, Mills constructs richly painted works on pieced paper, as he builds out his compositions through multiple visits to his two distinct but united locales of inspiration. Like a mapmaker, Mills draws and paints what he sees, but his paintings inevitably cross over into the unknown, where the visible and invisible meet- where the seen pays a constant debt to the unseen. As the Adirondack swamps and ancient Roman tunnels commingle, a new yet seemingly primeval scene unfolds before the viewer. We bear witness to the imagination of history itself, to the false omnipotence of the present which imposes our humble, penitent contemplation of the past. The brittle sciences of archeology and ecology crumble away as Mills uproots our vision and commandeers our desire for representational accuracy and empirical truths. The work urges us to see light within shadows, and to live within the reverie of a faint, but not forgotten, powerfully vivid dream.
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John Dilg: Natural Re-visions 1 March - 14 April 2007 With a unique and idiosyncratic approach, John Dilg investigates the unnatural sources of natural memories in his third exhibition of paintings at Luise Ross Gallery. Through an economy of formal means, Dilg brings personal markers and emblems to life in his small-scale yet potent paintings. By essentially distilling personal experiences and memories, Dilg transports the viewer to moments of contemplative quietude, whose importance is both immediately apparent and ambiguous. These paintings skillfully balance the simplistic and the complex, the passive voice and active assertion, as they quietly but assuredly venture forth from the artist's imagination. The exquisitely built-up surfaces of these small canvases further emphasize the unnatural artifice of memory, symbolizing perhaps the layered contrivance of our recollection of past events. The title of the exhibition, "Natural Re-visions," holds in itself a crucial double-meaning. These paintings, for Dilg, both revise and reconstruct memory, as they present unnatural accounts of purportedly natural events, places, persons, and experiences. They are the products of the conditions present when, in the words of the artist, "remaking reality makes the world."
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Thomas Burleson: Lone Star 9 January – 24 February 2007 Luise Ross Gallery will present the first major exhibition of works on paper by Thomas Burleson (1914-1997), a self-taught artist from Texas who produced a substantial body of brilliantly colored works during a thirty-year period. Much of the work was done while the artist was employed as a shipping inspector at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in California, and during retirement. A cross-section of the entire oeuvre will be presented. After making numerous machine-like pencil drawings on small pieces of paper during the late 1960s, Burleson’s work in the 1970’s became taught, brilliantly colored, and intuitively composed. His paintings are mechanistic, architectural, and figural, but defy categorization as the artist blends subjects and perspectives into singular representations. Underlying the art is the multifaceted insertion of his persona into numerous situations and compositions, where the human form, visionary architecture, and mechanistic imagery are integrated. Toward the end of the artist’s life the work became more whimsical and the compositions freer as Burleson continued to experiment in his approach. Most intriguing is the fact that over thirty years the artist produced no two works alike. However, numerous themes appear throughout the work, including a fortress-like construction, a fondness of dogs and chickens, and a central figure entrapped by ambiguously sinister surroundings. The artist’s work is included in the Neuve Invention section of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, founded by Jean Dubuffet. A 28-page color catalog with an essay by Edward M. Gómez accompanies this exhibition.
Reviewed 17 February 2007 by N.F. Karlins on artnet.com.
Image illustrated 26 January 2007 "A Convocation of the Visionary and Disenfranchised" by Grace Gluek in The New York Times
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TL Solien: Insulatus 4 November – 23 December 2006 TL Solien presents large-scale mixed-media works on paper using imagery extracted from the deepest recesses of his memory as well as the pages of 19th-century classics including Melville’s Moby Dick. Coupling literary allusions with mysterious iconography, the artist delivers a deconstructive yet cohesive, deeply personal statement. These works explode with brightly-colored paper cut-outs which contrast with brooding backgrounds as the artist adeptly selects potent symbols to mix with eerie atmospheres. All the while Solien upends the narrative of the hunt for the white whale by coupling and interjecting it with episodes from his own history – parables, hang-ups, and hauntings. Other macabre tales collide in these works, largely nonfiction, such as John Hunter’s 19th-century sperm whale dissections and the spread of the plague through ship-based commerce, on so-called “death ships.” Musing on the term “Insulatus” (in Latin “isolated” or “made into an island”) the artist uses Ahab’s ludicrous and self-destructive quest as a metaphor for the creative quest of the artist – the solitary, maddening, lifelong pursuit of one’s vision. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery, his seventh in New York. Reviewed May 2007 by Leigh Anne Miller in Art in America
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Robert Birmelin: Citizens 14 September – 28 October 2006 Robert Birmelin’s paintings convey a vision of the city's environment in all its anonymous intimacy, where the physical and psychological boundaries between crowd and self blur. Mobs of people pass fantastically through a woman’s profile; the bust of a man dematerializes by the riverfront. Disjunctive shifts of scale, focus, and orientation spell out this urban narrative, where pictorial restlessness underlies a multifaceted perspective. These paintings attempt to capture the disorienting common space of public life, where strangers may be simultaneously aware of yet invisible to each other. Having worked and exhibited in New York City for more than forty years, Birmelin displays an acute awareness of the city’s relentless social transformation that is as disconcerting for the immigrant who confronts an alien world as for the long-time resident who struggles with the sense of inevitable change. His provocative, brilliantly colored paintings startle the viewer as they capture the churning, tumultuous, and hallucinatory experience of New York’s melting pot.
This is Birmelin’s eighteenth solo exhibition in New York since 1960. He is a recent grant recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Forthcoming review in Art in America.
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FUN! 29 June – 28 July 2006
Summer group exhibition including works by Henry Speller, Willie Birch, Samuel Rothbort, John Dilg, Pierre Carbonel, Thomas Lyon Mills, Judith Page, Walter Anderson, Robert Birmelin, Tyyne Esko, Edward Koren, James Harrison, Ferdinand J. Pleines, Leroy Person, John Roeder, Louis Monza, China Marks, Jeroen Pomp, Minnie Evans, Michael Madore, Thomas Burleson, TL Solien, Reverend Herman Hayes, and Jean-Pierre Nadau.
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China Marks: Fabrications 11 May – 24 June 2006 In her second exhibition of sewn drawings at Luise Ross Gallery, China Marks wields her industrial sewing machine with virtuosic dexterity to produce perplexing scenes of unknown and surreal characters. Comprised of scraps of commercially made fabrics, Marks’s drawings juxtapose myriad patterns, textures, and forms. Spontaneous yet masterful, these works are fashioned from an automatic artistic process, where mysterious figures erupt into fantastic revelries – sometimes horrific, often whimsical, and always startling. What sometimes appear as benign storybook representations often turn out to be bizarre scenes of domination and struggle, which surprise the viewer lulled by the seemingly benevolent appearance of the fabrics. As unclearly as the relationships among the characters are defined, there is nonetheless a theatrical unity in the work, which serves not only as an illustration of the process of collage itself – disparate elements coming together as expression – but as a visual credo, which seems to pronounce ‘this is what is happening when I am creating.’
The New York Times called her 2004 exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery “one of the season’s more original shows,” and the present exhibition reveals an artist in hot pursuit of a singular and magical vision, who says “surprising myself is my definition of success.”
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James Harrison: The Future is in the Past 1 April – 6 May 2006 James Harrison (1925-1990) sought spiritual transcendence through art and probed the inner machinations of the self through artistic practice. But unlike the approach of some of his New York School mentors, Harrison’s interrogation of the self was neither lofty in its aesthetic motivation nor didactic in execution. A gritty, uncompromising, deeply personal counterpoint to the haughtier aesthetic ambitions of the abstract expressionists, Harrison’s oeuvre reveals the darker aspects of self-transcendence. Harrison's road to the sublime led him through an intense exploration of sexuality, altered states of consciousness, Jungian dream analysis, alchemy, tantra, astrology and the Kabbalah. Reviewed in The New York Times by Ken Johnson, 28 April 2006, p. E37. Reviewed in The Village Voice by R.C. Baker, 18 April 2006 Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail by Peter Acheson, April 2006, p. 34. Reviewed in Art in America by Edward Leffingwell, December 2006, p.160.
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Willie Birch 18 February – 25 March 2006 The four large-scale grisaille works on paper in this exhibition, his fifth at the Luise Ross Gallery since 1994, were completed during his recent fellowship at the CUE Foundation in New York. Displaced from his studio in the Seventh Ward in New Orleans, Birch has been afforded the opportunity to look upon the Big Easy, his beloved, life-long muse, from a brisk Big Apple vantage, and the four large-scale grisaille works on paper evoke the soul and élan of the residents of New Orleans as vigorously as they interrogate notions of memory, identity, and cultural continuity. These paintings compel us to seize the present, to face reality and reject the obfuscation of “truth”, to see things in grayscale – metaphor of flexibility, the locus of reconciliation. The work suggests that were we to embrace the present, and each other, all as saints we might go marching.
The artist is a 2006 grant recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
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William Fields: The Hidden Miraculous 12 January – 12 February 2006 William Fields (b. 1940), in his second exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery, continues his monumental Illuminations Suite, which now consists of more than 100 large-scale drawings. Informed by hermetic science and a lifelong study of world religion, Fields’ virtuosic, brilliantly colored drawings transport the viewer to a fantastic universe – a cosmology where gods and demigods exist under moons and constellations of the artist’s own conjuring. Figures dissolve and reconstitute themselves repetitiously in accelerating rivulets of electrified color and delineation; monumental apparitions emerge out of dense, multi-faceted metamorphoses of form. Jewel-like faces materialize and dematerialize in tandem, since the entranced artist doesn’t know what he is bringing to life as the drawing nears completion. The work reveals an artist who is in the service of a magical force. Mythmaking but eschewing the pitfalls of narrative, Fields presents his visions fully realized under a singular perceptival compass.
Reviewed in Raw Vision by Tom Patterson, Winter 2006, pp. 62-67.
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Walter Anderson Surviving: Watercolors, Drawings, Prints 17 November 2005 – 7 January 2006 Luise Ross Gallery, in its twelfth exhibition of Walter Anderson’s (1903-1965) work since 1985, will help to raise funds for the conservation of the drawings, watercolors, sculpture, paintings, and prints which were severely damaged in Hurricane Katrina. At least eighty percent of his considerable opus was underwater during the tidal surge on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in Ocean Springs. Anderson exhibited large-scale linoleum block prints at the Brooklyn Museum in 1949 (then the largest ever made in the US), illustrated the flora and fauna of the Mississippi Gulf Coast extensively, and spent weeks on Horn Island observing and painting wildlife. He was a watercolorist in the tradition of Burchfield, Dove, and Marin, who captured the essence of nature. A new documentary film,Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist, by Winston Riley and David Wolf, will be screened throughout the exhibition. Reviewed in ARTNews, March 2006, by Ann Landi.
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New Location 15 October – 12 November 2005 After locations on 57th Street and Soho, Luise Ross Gallery relocated this August for the third time in the past 23 years to Chelsea. The gallery will present an exhibition of recent work by gallery artists for the inaugural show. New paintings by Willie Birch feature New Orleans musicians, and John Dilg plays with just the right juxtaposition of ironic elements while Thomas Lyon Mills continues his exploration of the catacombs in Rome. China Marks’ new sewn drawings reflect the artist’s ever-increasing expressive inventiveness and dexterity. New sculpture by Judith Page reveals the artist’s personal, expanding lexicon of everyday surrealism, and a new mixed media painting by TL Solien delves into his series on Melville’s Moby Dick. Alongside the work of contemporary artists are pieces by the major self-taught artists of the gallery stable, including Minnie Evans and Bill Traylor.
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Visual Glossolalia 15 June – 15 July 2005
Visual Glossolalia, a group exhibition of self-taught artists at Luise Ross Gallery, explores the theme of inspired, mediumistic – for the Surrealists, “automatic” – writing, where nonsense script, puzzling symbology, and ‘writing in tongues’ abound. The elusive transformation of letters into images, words into art, and the subversion of concrete meaning into a celebration of mystery underlie the paintings and drawings of Minnie Evans, William Fields, Darcilio Lima, J.B. Murry, Leroy Person, Harald Stoffers, Melvin Way, and Carlo Zinelli.
Murry’s flowing and often painterly spirit script (which he read with a glass of water used as a magnifying glass), Evans’ evocative use of symbols (which evolved over her lengthy career), and Person’s colorful, vibrant hieroglyphics defy categorization. Although these artists worked with no knowledge of one another, they nonetheless are linked by their attempts to illuminate the inexpressible otherness of their visionary experiences. Stoffers’ “Dear Mother” lists, Way’s mathematical tableaux, and Carlo Zinelli’s repetitive, graphic announcements invite the viewer to decipher a language which hovers on a cognitive frontier. This exhibition offers us a chance to refrain from the urge to force rational interpretation, to suspend outmoded formal criteria, and to enter into the visionary’s exploration of consciousness and the Beyond.
This exhibition is accompanied with an essay by Jenifer P. Borum, critic and scholar of visionary art.
Reviewed in The New York Times, 1 July 2005, by Roberta Smith. |
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Guðrun Kristjánsdóttir The Thaw: Iceland 23 April – 10 June 2005
The springtime thaw in Iceland is the subject of Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir’s second exhibition at Luise Ross Gallery. In her videos and paintings, Kristjánsdóttir focuses on the dark patterning that forms on the hillsides in spring and the drifts of snow that linger on well into the summer. She examines the interplay of light, fog and other effects of weather, capturing the moment when details blur and gullies and ridges are drawn out of stillness into an uncoordinated dance. Working on the borderline between film and painting, Kristjánsdóttir uses the video camera for exploring the landscape, creating a space where films are paintings and paintings can be stills from films. The attention shifts from frozen moments to the constant movement of thawing. The difference between the simple and the ornate, the static and the evanescent, blurs and opens up a space for layers of varied perceptions.
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John Altoon: Paintings and Drawings 1961-1967 19 February - 16 April 2005
This exhibition of paintings and drawings by John Altoon (1925-1969), the first at Luise Ross Gallery and the first in New York since 1985, spans the last seven years of his short life, during which time his mature style emerged. Gestural abstraction has given way to pensive and restrained airbrushing, exuberant sexual tableaux, and the elimination of illusory space in his non-objective paintings. Altoon distilled his production to include only the bare pictorial essentials, with the result that his canvases became the arena for the focused portrayal of his subconscious, as well as the surreal circus of sexual fantasy. Biomorphisms, tertiary colors, and delicate formal rhymes and balances characterize the work, which is replete with psychological tension and fraught with an underlying desire to express the self’s inherent disgruntlements with the compromises necessary for social collectiveness. The work is honest, intensely personal, and uniquely nonconformist.
Reviewed in The New York Times, 25 February 2005, by Grace Glueck. Reviewed in Art in America, January 2005, by Michael Duncan.
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New - Thomas Burleson Nouveau - Jean-Pierre Nadau Nieuw - Jeroen Pomp 4-29 January 2005 The compulsion to articulate a world of abstracted inner reality resounds frenetically across the surfaces of works on paper by three self-taught artists exhibiting for the first time at Luise Ross Gallery. Thomas Burleson (American, 1914-1997), who worked at odd jobs throughout his life in Texas and California, spent untold hours constructing architectonic drawings which portray imaginary, mechanistic, industrial interiors/exteriors. His inventive, whimsical forms intermingle and conflate into the tableaux of a colorist working with his personal geometry. The pen and ink drawings of Jean-Pierre Nadau (French, b. 1963) are obsessively imbued with fine detail and contain a nearly hieroglyphic aesthetic, where innumerable narratives, figures, and graphic components pulsate across the page. Broader compositional elements grapple with the dizzying array of tiny details and characters so that the end result is one of both spontaneity and fragile balance. Jeroen Pomp (Dutch, b. 1985), an autistic artist, reproduces unique scenes of domesticity, public life, and the environs of his city. Working with crayon and pastel, Pomp suffuses his world with exuberant color and obsessive patterning, revealing a mosaic-like representation of his experiences.
Reviewed in artnet.com, 21 January 2005, by Nancy Karlins.
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Judith Page: Beauty and Beast 30 October - 22 December 2004 A Gothic sensibility, wry wit, and a gentle, reaffirming testament to the essential resilience of the human spirit distinguish the work of Judith Page. A major installation of small drawings and collages visually relates the artist’s adult autobiography—who she is, who she has become. Arranged in a grid composition complete with diary cover and binding, the installation mimes--but supersedes and edits—Page’s adolescent written diary pages. In the same autobiographical vein as the visual diary, several significant found and received objects, now painted or reconfigured by Page into sculptural forms, become totems and visual signposts of the artist’s history. And through the alchemy of Page’s art, these works transcend the particular and the personal into the experience of being human. Perhaps the most telling and moving paintings in the show, however, are the contemporary renderings of the Mouseketeers—again, ambiguously iconic images in Page’s youth—now gone off to war. “Bobby in Baghdad” and “Annette Around Abu Ghraib” are quintessential portraits of “innocence…lost” and “beauty defiled,” making a prophetic mockery of “Wednesday: Anything-can-happen day!” and a plaintive prayer of “See you real soon!”
Reviewed in Art in America, April 2005, by Edward Leffingwell, p. 150
Reviewed in The New York Times, 3 December 2004, by Ken Johnson.
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Dopes, Dupes, and Demagogues: Viewed by Outsiders
14 September - 23 October 2004 Historically, artists have provided the most potent and lasting images of revolution, war and social change. Moments of collective crisis have often prompted the most far-reaching and heroic of artistic expressions. In the twentieth century, this opportunity has most often been afforded to photographers, film makers, and people working in the medium of television, whose immediacy and access has made their imagery the prime record of modern history. A select group of twentieth-century outsider artists chose to cling to the somewhat old-fashioned belief in the efficacy of handmade artistic imagery when faced with the dramatic events and issues of the century. Through their work they found a public voice, a private dialogue and a fulsome expression of fear and rage and hope and exultation in the face of horrifying events. These artists did not turn inward nor did they dwell completely in a world of their own making. Instead, they addressed the concerns of the common man and woman, their brothers and sisters struggling to survive in a complex and hostile world. These artists demonstrate a high degree of altruism, far-sightedness, sharp analysis and a great deal of affection for those who were caught in the grip of malevolent powers at home and abroad. Identifying themselves with the underdog, the everyman, the working person doing an honest day's labor or going to war, they created a living record of a history not usually found on television, in school textbooks or engraved on the face of public monuments.
Excerpted from exhibition announcement essay by Susan C. Larsen, Ph.D.
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Thomas Lyon Mills
"73 Prayers in the Undergound" 10 June - 23 July 2004 Within the ancient passageways of the Roman catacombs and the primeval forests and swamps of the Adirondacks, Thomas Lyon Mills draws on his personal contemplation of sacred spaces to paint the history around him. Searching for remnants of the past --stone structures of the Colosseum or abandoned dilapidated sheds deep in the woods –he captures their hushed mystery through observation. The artist closely examines stone-hewed labyrinths, glistening with moisture and graffiti, and brings to life the mossy, canopied swamps, isolated from culture and present time. These paintings incorporate a range of different media, including watercolor, ink, collage, woodblock prints and frottage on paper, to create a sometimes transparent, sometimes detailed space that is at once disorienting and awesome. And since Mills believes the work is never finished, he will piece these sheets of paper together as the subject dictates. The end result is a moving panorama that draws us into the artist’s world of myth and memory.
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T.L. Solien
"Hollow" 24 April - 5 June 2004 Referencing cartoons, storybook illustration and the drawings of children, the large-scale paintings of T.L. Solien are derived from a personal obsession with childhood memory. With these images, he creates an arena for himself in which both the contemporary Self and the artist's own personal identity become the subjects of a dreamlike narrative. Veiled in seemingly disparate and highly personal iconography and the artist's own invented visual language, Solien explores the peril and fragility of being human and the ambiguity and conflict of the choices we make. Reviewed in Art in America, January 2005, by Charles Dee Mitchell, p. 128. Reviewed in The New York Times, 21 May, 2004, by Ken Johnson.
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China Marks
"New Work" 6 March - 17 April 2004 China Marks will have her first exhibition of sewn drawings at Luise Ross Gallery. Three years ago, she began drawing with an industrial, zig-zag, sewing machine, shaping unknown and surreal creatures from a wide variety of commercially made fabrics. These sewn drawings start from scraps, juxtaposed onto a larger ground, cut up, stitched together and delineated into form -- by machine and by hand. Mixing narratives and lush, vivid pattern, her figures are sometimes barely discernable and, at other times, converse and intermingle with the background. The element of surprise and play in Marks' work culminates in a beauty of opposites. Her drawings are predominantly centered on one or several idiosyncratic characters, posited within unusually captivating settings, spontaneously born from an automatic artistic process. The artist subconsciously weaves themes of beautiful sadness or happy fear into an altogether emotive composition.
Reviewed in Art in America, February 2005, by Jessica Ostrower, p. 132. Reviewed in The New York Times, 9 April, 2004, by Grace Glueck.
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Reverend McKendree Robbins Long
"Salvation and Smothered Passions" 3 January - 28 February 2004 Previously part of a retrospective that traveled to North Carolina museums, this was the first New York exhibition of Reverend McKendree Robbins Long. His large paintings depict God's wrath at human wickedness and the just torments suffered by the damned. After a thirty-year career as an itinerant evangelist preacher, Reverend Long illustrated scenes from the Book of Revelations. Creating a dramatic balance of lush forests and clouds with violent clashes of the divine and the human, Long posited his scenes of 'end-times' within fantasy landscapes. In addition to Long's Revelations paintings, equally fascinating are his obsessive, passionate portraits depicting a mysterious 'Woman in Red.'
Reviewed in The New York Times, 16 January and 30 January, 2004, by Ken Johnson
Reviewed in The New York Sun, 12 February, 2004, by Thomas Disch
Reviewed in artnet.com, 27 January, 2004, by Nancy Karlins
Reviewed in Art in America, September 2004, by Michael Amy.
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Walter Anderson "Centennial" 17 October - 19 December 2003 The eleventh exhibition of Walter Anderson's work at Luise Ross Gallery since 1985, celebrating the centennial of his birth. The exhibition features his watercolors and drawings, illustrating the predominant aspect of the artist's long and prolific career. Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) was born in New Orleans and spent most of his life on the Mississippi Gulf coast. On Horn Island, where he lived for weeks at a time, sheltered by only his rowboat, he experienced the natural world, observing its forms and seasons. From his student years at the Pennsylvania Academy to his institutionalization, his serene life at Oldfields, to his defining period on Horn Island, Anderson achieved a unity with nature and was able to depict its essence through patterns of line and color. A master watercolorist who was "more in love with nature than art," he achieved a perfect balance of abstraction and objectivity. This exhibition coincided with two other centennial celebrations, one at the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building in Washington DC, and another at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. In addition, a comprehensive catalog will accompany the Washington venue and Christopher Maurer has written a major biography on Anderson, Fortune's Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson.
Reviewed in d'art International, Winter 2004 (vol. 7, number 1), by Jeanne Wilkinson, p. 34-35.
Reviewed in Art in America, May 2004, by Nathan Kernan.
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Samuel Rothbort "Twilight Fantasies" 9 September - 11 October 2003 Samuel Rothbort's "fantasies" combine an innate spontaneity with skills amassed over sixty years of painting, sculpting and drawing. He kept this large group of watercolors and ink drawings largely to himself during his lifetime. With an intuitive approach, these mysterious compositions display the artist's continued awe for the power of nature as he reached his eighties. His subjects were also drawn from childhood memories, religion and mythology. Born in Russia, Rothbort came to America in 1904 and started painting in 1909. Exhibiting in the teens and twenties with the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America and the Brooklyn Society of Artists, he gained early recognition with his oil paintings and sculpture. His work has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums, even in The Rothbort's Home-Museum of Direct Art, which opened in 1948. Reviewed in The New York Times, 3 October, 2003, by Ken Johnson. |
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Gallery Group 1 July - 31 July 2003 Group exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture and photographs, featuring Willie Birch, Robert Birmelin, John Dilg, William Fields, Steve Lovi, Charles Luce, China Marks, Thomas Lyon Mills, Melissa Polhamus, Geneviève Seillé, T.L. Solien and John R. Thompson. |
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Autodidacts from Abroad 9 May - 28 June 2003 Highlighted by masters Adolf Wölfli and Carlo Zinelli, this selection of artists from Europe, Africa, Iceland and beyond provided a broader context for untrained artists and merged together the architecture, faces, language and colors of cultures from around the globe. Many of these artists, like Pierre Carbonel, Eggert Magnusson and Serge Vollin, all cull their bold forms in much the same way - inspired by stories, memories, dreams - differentiated solely by their innate aesthetic. Other artists, such as Madge Gill and Anna Zemankova derive their forms and ideas from more spiritual sources, as Frédéric Bruly Bouabré states, "Art is the perfect and eternal imitation of divine works in time and space." Including Anselme Boix-Vives, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Pierre Carbonel, Nek Chand, Tyyne Esko, Johann Fischer, Madge Gill, Martha Grünenwaldt, Óskar Jónsson, Mathias 'Junior' Kawage, Eggert Magnusson, Sava Sekulic, Serge Vollin, August Walla, Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemankova, Carlo Zinelli.
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George McNeil "FE=Form/Energy" 7 March - 3 May 2003 This exhibition of paintings by George McNeil (1908-95) spanned forty years of the artist's long, prolific and illustrious career. McNeil's canvasses pulse with electrifying color and energy. He laid down thick layers of contrasting colors, almost anchoring his figures and objects to the picture plane, and at the same time endowing them with a monumental force. Placing his shapes and figures in ambiguous spaces, which he described as possessing "swing," he created a complementary energy between the object and its space. McNeil believed this energy would dissolve the object and leave only his expression. Reviewed in The New York Times, 21 March, 2003, by Ken Johnson and in Art in America, December 2003, by David Ebony. |
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David Butler & Minnie Evans "Color, Pattern and the Fantastic" 9 January - 1 March 2003 Within the brilliant color and multi-layered patterns of their art, Minnie Evans (1892 - 1987) and David Butler (1898 - 1997), two southern self-taught artists, found a way to honor the God that drove them to create. Evans culled her artistic vision - fantastic and bold drawings of creatures, nature and the omnipresent eyes of God - from the luscious flora of Airlie Gardens in North Carolina, as well as from the voice of God. With his house and yard as his stage, Butler used his 'gift' - snipping tin cutouts and decorating them with enamel paints - to animate and embellish his world with creations God sent to him in his dreams. Seen together, they present their inspired visions with a similar love of color, pattern and an obsession with the ethereal.
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Willie Birch "Portraits of a New Orleans Majority"
1 November - 21 December 2002 This latest phase in Willie Birch's continuing series of life-sized paintings of his New Orleans neighbors is a tour de force in grisaille, complemented by Birch's ingenious ability to integrate every part of his compositions - background and foreground - into one complex, but harmonious narrative. These large charcoal and acrylic portraits - a street preacher, chess players, a little girl playing jacks - are loving tributes to his community by an artist whose unerring eye informs the viewer of its dignity and cultural richness.
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Kaffe Fassett "Pattern as Obsession"
10 September - 26 October 2002 Vibrantly colored and imaginatively conceived, Kaffe Fassett's recent work departs from his purely decorative format into decidedly reflective compositions. Focusing on his love for pattern, the artist has utilized his trademark needlework, along with knitting and rug hooking, and enhanced their visual possibilities with collage -- buttons, beads, shells and pearls. These abstract experiments in pattern range from the intricately complex and luxuriously textured, with backgrounds of marbled cotton and hand-painted Japanese fabrics, to elegantly spare shapes, accented with collage. The spectrum culminates in the non-textile collage Monotone, a paradoxically rhythmic image composed of only clothespins. The show is a rich variety of disparate objects and textile media resonantly unified by Fassett's artistic vision of the universal patterning in all that is human. Reviewed in The New York Times, 4 October, 2002, by Ken Johnson.
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Tyyne Esko "Paintings, Poetry and Protest"
9 May - 26 July 2002 Self-taught, but with a consummate intuitive knowledge of the formal aspects of painting, the Finnish artist Tyyne Esko created oils that document and decry the changing social landscape of her country during the second half of the twentieth century. Mourning the past and assailing the present, she engaged nature and poetry to convey the pain of isolation and loss experienced by the poor and less fortunate, abandoned and then ignored by what she perceived to be an increasingly smug and indifferent society. The result is a subtle style of atmospheric painting which complements and advocates the gentle, idyllic beauty of rural Finland and its inhabitants.
Recent Publicity - "A Social Critic Who Makes the Ordinary a Weapon,"
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William Fields "A Visionary's Universe"
23 March - 4 May 2002 From Winston-Salem, North Carolina, William Fields' interest in non-Western religions, as well as a passion for drawing, began early in life. In his first New York exhibition, brilliantly colored, intricately composed drawings record meditative journeys, entitled Illuminations Suite. He sets out to fuse existentialism, the I Ching, Theosophy, Gnostic Christianity, as well as other traditions, to capture the forms, colors and powers of a larger spiritual being. Drawn mostly while in a trance-like state, the artist can feel this being flowing through him, producing agitated portraits - both personal and mysterious - of morphing, composite faces, surrounded by a vortex of iconography. Reviewed in Art in America, February 2003, by Michael Amy. |
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Serge Vollin "Dark Nights"
11 October - 10 November 2001 Serge Vollin's richly colored paintings are steeped in the memory of his early life in Algeria, forced out by dreams and nightmares. His troubled mind conjures up forms and figures during long, sleepless nights. At once disjointed, faceless and terrifying, his subjects are often humorous and endearing. This series of acrylic paintings were done mostly during the artist's hospitalization in a Munich psychiatric institute, where he refused traditional help. Artistic creation was substituted for normal therapy.
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