Standing Fast at the Bowery Gallery

The Bowery Gallery opens its 17th annual juried exhibition of American artists today. Founded in 1969, the gallery is a cooperative of more than 30 artists seeking to defend the figurative tradition in contemporary art.“We were always about art for art’s sake,” the gallery’s director and a founding member, Lynda Caspe, said.In the early years, that meant rejecting the tenets of conceptualism, Pop art, and other industrialized approaches to art making. Instead, the emphasis was on promoting artists who espoused traditional techniques and subject matters. Its juried show is an opportunity to showcase lesser-known artists who share the gallery’s aesthetic values. And like the work of the gallery members, the works in the juried show reflect the diverse approaches to figuration. While some artists’ work is rooted in the earlier movements of the 20th century, which recall the gestural sensitivities of Edward Hopper and other American realists, others strongly embrace the abstract impulses of postwar expressionism.In the past, the Bowery Gallery (which is located in west Chelsea) has invited prominent artists, such as the abstract painter Joan Snyder and New Realist artist Gabriel Laderman, to jury the show, but this year the cooperative asked the New Republic’s art critic, Jed Perl, to select the works.“He was at the top of our list for this year’s juror,” a gallery member, David Bradford, said.The author of the forthcoming book “Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World,” Mr. Perl, in turn, has strong ties to the organization. His wife, the painter Deborah Rosenthal, is a member of the cooperative, and he has written about the Bowery during the course of his career.After reviewing more than 300 submissions, Mr. Perl chose 35 drawings and paintings.“As a critic I’m really just a person who loves to look at things,” he said. “The first thing I ask myself when looking at a work of art is, ‘Does it hold me? Does it make me want to look more?’ That’s always the crucial question, no matter what the venue.”Many of the works Mr. Perl selected are quite painterly and the subject matter rooted in the observed world. He did not, however, impose any stylistic or formal criteria when making his choices.“It’s the artist who shapes my approach, and it’s the artist who decides what’s things are going to interest me,” he said. “Some paintings are very tightly done; others are very gestural. The question for me is: ‘Has the artist persuaded me that the direction they are taking is engaging?'”The experience of the artists who submit work to the Bowery’s juried show also varies widely. There are recent graduates from art schools, such as Rebecca Kallem, who earned her MFA at the University of New Hampshire last spring. Her “Self Portrait as a Doll,” a heavily impastoed, small-scale oil painting, will be her first work on exhibit in New York City. Professors of art participate as well. The landscape artist Andrew Wylie, who submitted his oil painting “Bondes Farm,” teaches painting and life drawing at Hamline University in Minnesota. Some, such as Chris Fletcher, of Columbia, Mo., have become a familiar presence in the Bowery’s juried show. This year, Mr. Fletcher will have two pencil drawings on display, one of a Borghese warrior drawn from the plaster cast of a classical frieze, the other depicting an unmade bed.Mr. Perl received no biographical information about the artists when culling the submissions, making the experience of the work itself a fresh and unmediated encounter. “It’s very different from going to a show of someone whose work I’ve followed for a number of years and maybe written about in the past, which I approach with a whole context of previous experiences,” Mr. Perl said. “Many people who come to see the show will have a similar experience to mine — it’s like a quick interaction with a person at a party, someone you may not have known before. Still, something may strike you during that encounter that has a lot of resonance. There’s a lot of very good stuff that doesn’t get any attention, and in this show you are going to see a range of artists and art that you might not see somewhere else.”And that has everything to do with the guiding ethos of the gallery. “The Bowery Gallery takes an interest in and is concerned with the idea that a lot of the great traditions in the visual arts are things that still sustain us and still shape art today,” Mr. Perl said. “It’s a gallery where a lot of the people involved feel that ‘tradition’ is a present-tense thing. And to me, tradition is not a backward-looking thing. It’s a continuum from the past into the future.”Until August 16 (530 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 4th Floor, 646-230-6656).

Standing Fast at the Bowery Gallery

Standing Fast at the Bowery Gallery

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