Color and Style
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Leah Durner’s exhibition opening this evening at Loretta Howard Gallery promises to display a panoply of influences in a modernist parlor.
“Drawing her color from many sources, including fashion, surfer and skateboard art, and mass design, Durner uses a full palette: beautiful, ugly, sick, joyful, fake, real, sweet, tart, pale and dark,” according to the gallery. “In Prada Spring 1996 (2006), Durner takes the colors right off the runway—from Miuccia Prada’s breakthrough Spring 1996 collection—where ‘ugly’ color and ‘geek’ style became a celebrated part of the high-fashion aesthetic. She builds this surface with thick chunks of paint. Always using a raw and direct application, Durner plays with depth and surface, coherence and dissolution, seriousness and frivolity.
“For this exhibition, Durner has transformed the gallery space into a reading room furnished with midcentury modern furniture and with books on art and design available for perusal. The installation embraces the gallery’s program of late modernist painting, the intimate scale and location of the space itself and the playful sensibility of summer.”
“Leah Durner: Paintings 2002-2006” opens today, 6-8 PM, and runs through August 3 at Loretta Howard Gallery, 525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212-695-0164, lorettahoward.com.
Franklin Einspruch is the art critic for The New York Sun. He blogs at Artblog.net.
