Simplicity and Imagination

In nature, it is said that every action is balanced by an opposite and equal reaction. The art world is not bound to this law of physics but nonetheless displays a similar pattern in how modern art movements react to each other.Turning away from her Abstract Expressionist training in the late 1960s, Martha Erlebacher went on to become a master of representational painting and brought to it a freshness and humor that is really pretty wonderful. In over 30 works, ranging from imaginative still life compositions to metaphor-loaded representations of the human form, the New York Academy of Art’s current retrospective explores and celebrates the career of this renowned and talented painter who passed away earlier this year.The dozen or so still-life compositions on display are amazing in their simplicity and imagination. The near-monochrome palette and simple arrangement of earthen jugs in “Mother, May I?,” 2007, is softly lit up with two citruses. Tones shift subtly as shapes overlap, the contours of the jugs becoming a very quiet kind of rhythm that carries through the work. Stripped to its essentials, the genre here seems reinvented.The familiar, even pedestrian elements in “Through the Glass II,” 2007, of a pear, an italian pepper, an orange, and a shallow glass dish, become a tight composition of elegant forms with shifts of color, light, and reflection balancing the geometric, thick-walled glass dish against its organic counterparts and their simple, spherical curves.“Tic, Tac, Toe,” 2007, is an example of the creative imagination always making something new out of ordinary objects and familiar genres. The tongue-in-cheek humor inherent in many of Erlebacher’s works shows itself here in the orderly playfulness of the folds in the tablecloth, a soft grid separating fruits and vegetables. Its high-keyed palette is nonetheless softened, the sharpness taken out of the colors as the entirely straight-forward grid layout becomes a pun in itself, contradicting the Dutch-inspired layout in “Illusion IV,” 2010, with its historical familiarity.In several works, the human figure becomes a vehicle for exploring themes of Man and Nature which often seem dreamlike. “In the Mire,” 2008, shows a male nude standing at the edge of a stream, his arms raised out horizontally and seeming to merge somehow with the ground that rises at his back. The root systems emerging from the ground behind him become part of him, or he with them, as Man and Nature reunite.Under a quiet, distant moon, a nude, white-haired woman lies in a clearing on the snow covered ground, in “The Cycle of Life, Water,” 2008. As winter slowly recedes, long-hidden forms are again revealed and the sleeping woman emerges in what is a natural rhythm of the seasons.“Apollo,” 1971, shows how Erlebacher mastered early on the depiction of the human form, a development in her work which was of central importance. Keep in mind that at this time the classical study of human anatomy was about as far from the dictates of the contemporary art world as one could go. In this simple, open-air setting, a young male nude stands upon a geometric tile floor beneath soft clouds and blue sky, the curls of his hair floating around his slightly tilted head, his back to a body of water with low, modernist buildings beyond.There is a joke about ducks that shows up in “Duck, Duck, Goose,” 2008, and several other works. It is not necessary to understand it in order to go with the humor. “Vanitas,” 2006, recalls the centuries-old genre of the same name, a meditation on the transience of life. In muted tones, Erlebacher gives us familiar symbols of the passing of time and the ephemeral nature of mortality — a skull, a stack of books, an empty drinking glass, a burning candle. Nothing stirs but the flicker of the candlelight. It’s when we notice the spent ammunition and the feathers that we understand the skull is that of a duck, and that the joke is on us.“Martha Erlebacher Retrospective” is on view through Sunday, November 24, 2013, at New York Academy of Art, 111 Franklin Street, New York, NY 10013. 212-966-0300More information about Robert Edward Bullock’s work can be found at bullockonline.com.

Simplicity and Imagination

Simplicity and Imagination

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