SALLY MICHEL: OUTDOOR PASTIME
Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery

“Trendy” art puts a premium on novelty of style. After all, what more expedient way of tokening an original temperament? Lost in the mix, unfortunately, is the fact that style serves best as a vessel for deeper expressions.

A glance at Sally Michel’s two dozen paintings at Katharina Rich Perlow confirms their close affinity to the work of her husband Milton Avery (1885–1965). Michel, who died in 2003 at age 100, not only painted the same kind of domestic and recreational subjects, but also relied on a similar language of angular, abstracted forms. In these paintings spanning some three decades, the idiom of crisp shapes and intense, flat colors occasionally seems like a reflexive habit. Yet many of them represent true acts of discovery; they’re full of fresh, personal observations that transcend stylistic quirks.

The small canvas “Friends” (c. 1950s) employs simple means to convey a complex scenario: the attitudes of self-absorbed figures in an open field. A muted salmon-pink, a quietly gleaming khakigreen, and a brilliant yellow become, respectively, flesh tones, skirt, and hair — and though crude in shape, these nuanced hues hold convincingly in space, communicating even such elusive qualities as the point of view, the workings of gravity, and the light of the broad outdoors.

In some of the larger paintings, colors don’t particularize elements as effectively, as if the artist were engaged more by mannerisms of depiction than by the contradictions of visual experience. Not so, however, for the 4-foot-wide “Beach at Noon” (1988). Here, the shrill pink patch of a towel lies buoyant upon a dense, encroaching plane of sienna-orange; both are held beneath the heavy richness of a pure ultramarine sea. Smaller incidents — shoes discarded on the towel’s corner, a distant figure bending over a bucket — echo or deflect the large rhythms. Whimsical in style, the canvas hums with clear-eyed purpose.

And then there’s the large vertical canvas “Exotic Bouquet” (1981). With intrepid understatement, washes of gray capture both the thickness and transparency of a vase’s column of water, while yellows, reds, and oranges locate flamboyant tiers of petals above. Again, Ms. Michel conveys the real through the artifice of paint — and in this case with an openness of rhythm quite unlike her husband’s.

Until November 4 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-644-7171).

– John Goodrich

LLOYD MARTIN
Stephen Haller Gallery

Providence-based painter Lloyd Martin has exhibited annually at Stephen Haller Gallery for the last five years. He paints lush surfaces segmented and contained by an austere geometry. Mr. Martin has found a fruitful and inexhaustible subject in harmonious variations on a movable grid.

He finds his grid in the renovated factory that houses his studio. His compositions begin with the lines of ventilation or heating units, the placement of doors or a line of windows, the direction of an electric cable or the contours of a posted notice. Working in layers of acrylic, oil, and encaustic, Mr. Martin creates a palimpset of scrupulous patterns structured on the rectangles of architectural spaces. Real life reference disappears; all that remains are vertical and horizontal contour lines. These are spaced intuitively to create rhythmic arrangements within the window of the canvas. Each of these paintings, all produced this year, is aptly titled “Finestrae.”

Dominant bands of color, frequently black, intersect with finer striations to form fields of elusive neutrals that are the fixed frameworks within which latitude is granted to chance. Its simplicity is offset by the complexlayering and reworking of surfaces.

Mr. Martin’s patterns are simplified, contemporary heirs to the Abstract Creation Group of the 1930s with one difference. Where the Group — represented most famously by Mondrian — concerned itself with abstract and geometric forms, Mr. Martin’s more emphatically linear approach limits his configurations to surface design. The limitation is no liability. His patterns and arrangements are full of surprises and changes of mood. They evade conventional attempts to make meaning of them. Instead, they appeal exclusively to our sense of scale and balance. In that sense, they approach the character of music.

Until October 31 (542 W. 26th St. between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-741-7777).

– Maureen Mullarkey

FOTO: NEW PHOTOGRAPHY FROM DENMARK
Scandinavia House

Given the breadth of “FOTO: New Photography From Denmark,” one wouldn’t guess the history of Danish photography is relatively short. Only critically received as a serious art form since the 1980s, photography has thrived in Denmark despite modest institutional support and without any makings of a formal school to rival that of Düsseldorf or Helsinki. Until recently, the best-known Danish photographers were the ones who captured America: Jacob Riis and Benedicte Wrensted in the late 19th century, and Jacob Holst in the 1970s.

Placing central figures like Keld Helmer-Petersen, whose work anticipated the color photography of the 1960s by several decades, alongside a younger generation of artists, the show surveys diverse currents, with artists readily mixing genres, subjects, and formats.

The naturalist clichés of Nordic photography — fjords and snowy peaks — are revamped in the optically distorted photos of a remote coastline by Hans Manner-Jakobsen and the bleary camera obscura images of the human form in symbiosis with nature by Kirsten Klein. Conversely, Inger Lise Rasmussen’s grainy photogravures show figures lost in the organic high-tech cityscapes of Scandinavian modernism.

Along with landscape and architecture, the emphasis in the show is on documentary and narrative modes — on the role of the photograph as public and private testimony and the camera’s ability to turn prosaic detail into an instant imbued with meaning.

The dreary faces in Krass Clement’s series “The Ferry” (1999), with their bland populism, follow from the portraiture of August Sander; the bullet-ridden, blown-out streets of Gaza in Henrik Saxgren’s photographs from the most telling photojournalism.

A more private, diary-like vein is seen in “Jump” (2005), a video installation of still images by Charlotte Haslund-Christensen, of fragmentary moments that evince how photographs become memories. Jacob Aue Sobol and Camilla Holmgren turn the narrative on themselves, focusing on intimacy and eroticism.

The untied suede shoe in Tina Enghoff’s “The Shoe” (2000) works on photography’s ability to celebrate the anecdotal and inconsequential, something that finds monumental form in “Blue Tablecloth” (2003), Hans Madsen’s large detail of something we ordinarily see without noticing.

The other elegiac side of photography is explored in the ghostly, re-photographed tombstone portraits of Torben Eskerod. A different sense of loss is captured succinctly in Nicolai Howalt’s diptych of a pimply adolescent boy before and after a boxing match. It is hung next to several photographs of rotting fruit, rich with the beauty of decay, by Per Bak Jensen.

If light on the recent generation of promising Danish photographers — Thomas Bangsted and Lasse Ernlund Lorentzen among them — the show is still a succinct introduction into how Danish photography has quickly come into its own.

Until November 11 (58 Park Ave. at 38th Street, 212-879-9779).

– João Ribas