... is Francesca Gabbiani at Patrick Painter Gallery. Hard to see it here , but these large-scale, provocatively baroque images are created entirely out of small elements of colored paper, glued together. I have a very small piece of hers, a yellow-jacket, which amazes me every time I look at it. Her work is getting larger and more daring in this current show. Next door, at Craig Krull Gallery, we found these extraordinary anatomical prints, again large scale, at once studies of the unbelievable beauty and intricacy of the human body, powerful memento mori's, and compelling works of art.
A couple of doors down, Richard Heller shows two artists,,,
... Charlie Roberts (that's a single painting, by the way) and his Norwegian wife, Heidi Johansen...
Roberts offers not only the large, richly-imaged pictures like "The Cave", above, where hundreds of objects and figures jostle for attention, but also dozens of quirky "short-stories"--told in half a dozen sequential images on small sheets of paper. They're funny, slightly bizarre, and some of the affectingly human. Johansen's tiny figures are carved out of balsa wood and tanged in shelves the length of the gallery wall. Amazingly, even though roughly carved, they manage to capture the life of their subjects with both humor and compassion.
Here's Margaret Gallegos...
... who's showing at Fig. With a newly attenuated palette--a good deal of black, white, and gray--she combines zesty abstraction with hints of figurative image, and asked the viewer's eye to join her in a jazzy journey through the picture plane.
You hear a lot these days about the paintings of the Armenian-American artist Gegam Kacherian at Rosamund Felsen...
They're certainly amazing paintings, assembling finely-painted figuration with fanciful abstraction, sci-fi futurism with ancient history, the majesty of the animal world with the absurdism of cartoon... As rich and unabashedly decorative as a Persian tapestry and intense with narrative interest, Kacherian's paintings engage both the eye and the mind a frenzy of activity.
Over at Ruth Bachnofner, I was impressed by the quiet serenity of the work of Seiko Tachibana...
(this is only a partial shot; the space of an entire gallery is filled with these gently floating banners, which bring to mind Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags).
I liked, too, the fine atmospheric landscapes of Yvatte Molina, these painted on aluminum disks.
I was unfortunately unable to grab images from Shoshana Wayne's exhibit of some stunning clay Kathy Butterly, but it's certainly worth a visit to her site, just a click away (be sure to follow the prompt for the entire sequence of pictures.) These small works manage to seem quite monumental on their individual pedestals. Their strange, idiosyncratic and sensually organic shapes suggest at once artifact and flesh, the vessel that contains and the vessel of the body. The polish of their gleaming exterior makes no attempt to conceal or diminish the vulnerability their forms evoke.
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