Gallery Going
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.
Ben Nicholson is a great classicist who brought to British Modernism a clarity and reticence that transcends nationality and style. Nicholson’s role, however crucial, in the development of British abstraction in the 1930s is secondary to the pleasures of the current exhibition at Jacobson Howard Gallery. The continuing relevance of his painting resides in its abiding loveliness.
Born to a family of painters and quickened by the School of Paris, the artist understood himself – as did Braque – to be a workman. Consummate craftsmanship informs every centimeter of these paintings, which balance Euclidian austerity with enlivened surfaces and sensitive color play.
Mr. Nicholson challenges the capacities of a flat surface with an architectonic approach that merges painting and carving. Color itself is handled as a form of relief. Areas of solid pigment advance from sections scraped back with renunciatory scruple, sometimes to the raw linen.
Nicholson’s whites alone are remarkable, ever shifting in weight and warmth. His seminal “White Relief” (1936) balances a solitary square and circle on a single panel. Wood is cut away from the square so that it appears embossed on the same plane into which the circle was incised.
This is the first exhibition of his work in New York for more than a decade and must not be missed.
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Kwang-Young Chun’s minimalist sympathies transform Korean folk practice – devotion to paper talismans – into compelling abstractions. In an ongoing series called “Aggregations,” now at Kim Foster Gallery, the artist conjures rhythmic compositions out of hundreds of amulet-like packets, bound triangles of inscribed mulberry paper wrapped around an unseen core.
He arranges these in clusters that undulate across the support in transverse waves, swelling and cresting like a migration of electrons. If the artist’s structures are simple, his components are intricate and delicately crafted. The dance of particles is sculptural, its tactility providing counterpoint to shifts of light delicately modulated by tonal variations in the paper.
More recent works exchange some of the poetry of previous designs for heightened spatial definition, suggesting a terrain pocked with depressions and steep hollows. I miss the seamlessness of previous compositions, but these latest remain elegant and seductive. Though inspired by his culture’s past, the artist’s achievement is thoroughly contemporary.
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Ronald Feldman Fine Art is the impresario of politicized sloganeering; hence, this post-convention panty raid on geopolitics: the cartoons of Nancy Chunn, a pulpiteer still chafing over the 2000 election and original sin.
One hesitates to gloss “9/11” (2002-4). Bumper sticker politics reduce handily to smart-alecky logos. Ms. Chunn paints one per box on large gridded canvases. A schematic pair of red lips closed by a zipper symbolizes – any guesses? – suppression of free speech. Who wields the muzzle? The answer lies not in her equivocal cliche but in the motto installed on the gallery’s window: “Say No to Bush’s Agenda.”
Ms. Chunn’s scales of justice are pointedly lopsided. Against whom? Ignore specifics; posture is everything. Down with oppression! And just say no to chocolate sundaes, cigarettes, and street crime, too. Her images are rhetorical devices designed to gull us into believing that the art is significant because of the seriousness of its real-life referent.
Predictably, there is no graphic suggesting a conquering Islam. But there are red-white-and-blue bombs, prerequisites for ideological titillation. All you need is a single title – “Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear” (2004) – to gauge the character of Ms. Chunn’s grasp of events.
Orwell’s dictum that there is always room for one more custard pie applies here in spades. Plausible engagement with social realities is obviated by coy puerilities that hide the absence of a coherent moral vision.