Baltimore’s Gallery 1448 Brings Together Painter Friends With Shared Focus on History

Gallery 1448 is hunkered down on an unprepossessing stretch of the Upper Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore. As an arts venue, it’s not as august as the Walters Art Museum or as tony as the Baltimore Museum of Art, but the gallery is, all the same, an integral component of the city’s cultural life. This showspace is an adjunct of Artists’ Housing Inc., the city’s original residential arts cooperative. The exhibition schedule focuses on the work of co-op members and local artists. The gallery is also welcoming to creative types outside of Maryland, particularly when mounting its annual erotica exhibition — which, as one might guess, tends to be among Gallery 1448’s most popular events.“John McGarity and Daniel Brown: Idol Hours,” the show up-and-running on East Baltimore Street, splits the geographical emphasis between New York and Maryland. You don’t need to know that John McGarity of Brooklyn and hometown boy Daniel Brown are friends of long-standing to intuit the commonalities they share as image-makers. It’s there to glean in the punning title: both men dedicate themselves, for the most part anyway, to rendering portraits of single individuals. Mr. McGarity mines the tradition of religious iconography, Byzantine art especially, and flavors it with a distinctly 20th-century disquietude. Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon would seem to be inspirations, but Mr. McGarity has his own squirrely purchase on the figure, being, at welcome moments, surprisingly tender in his painterly ministrations.Mr. Brown also has his eye on history — Netherlandish painting is a touchstone — but he evinces a postmodern capriciousness in his symbolic flourishes, as well as a distinct liking for the fleshpots. Buxom women, whether culled from the 15th-century or the strip joint around the corner, are a constant in his oeuvre. As for hours spent idling: Take that with a grain of irony. As artists, neither man has a lazy bone in his body. Messrs. McGarity and Brown are consummate craftsmen, if decidedly different in mien. The former prefers a roughhewn approach to process, in which flurried layers of paint accumulate into densely articulated surfaces. The latter is just as attuned to the layering of pigment, but its application is more finely tuned and meditatively set into motion. Both men love frames, employing them as tongue-in-cheek cultural signifiers even as their usage connotes a level of propriety.John McGarity, ‘Untitled #25.’ Via 1448 Gallery and the artistMr. McGarity engenders spookhouse vibes with a trio of grotesque apparitions placed under convex oval frames — portraits that might well have garnered the praise of H.P. Lovecraft. The artist is more approachable and, in the end, more idiosyncratic in a suite of diminutive shelf pieces in which manipulated photos are set within vintage cameo cases. Their soft-focus intimacy endows Mr. McGarrity’s otherworldly longings with a silky lyricism. The showpiece of “Idol Hours” is Mr. Brown’s “Sea Level” (2020), an encompassing drawing, measuring a good 43 x 48 inches, of the back of a woman who’s on the beach and gazing at the ocean. Its gradual accumulation of graphite — the looping movement of the pencil point coalescing, eventually, into flesh, bone, sand, and sky — is nothing if not bravura in its execution.Mr. Brown is no less estimable when hatching, dotting, and dashing with acrylics. His palette is crystalline and the formats are small — not much larger, one way or another, than a sheet of printing paper. The pieces invite close inspection: Mr. Brown’s fixation on European aristocracy is rendered all the more curious by extreme cropping and the overlay of golden incisions cadged, it would seem, from astronomical charts or topographical diagrams.Would that the exhibition had been pruned a bit in terms of the number of works on display. Less isn’t always more, but selectivity can prompt greater focus on the viewer’s part, particularly when the pieces merit sustained concentration. All the same, “Idol Hours” serves as confirmation that some of the most accomplished, puzzling, and rewarding contemporary art flies under the radar and flourishes outside of Manhattan.Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. A closing reception will be held March 31, between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Baltimore’s Gallery 1448 Brings Together Painter Friends With Shared Focus on History

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