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Email PageCompendium
June 30, 2006- September 19, 2006
Larry Zox, Lloyd Martin, Nobu Fukui, Linda Stojak, Johannes Girardoni, Kathy Moss, Ron Ehrlich, Johnnie Winona Ross, Michel Alexis, Catherine Gfeller
Stephen Haller Gallery
542 W 26th St Linda Stojak Figure 29 (2005) |  Johannes Girardoni Untitled (2003) |  Nobu Fukui Bang (2006) |
The exhibition includes key paintings by LARRY ZOX, a master of color and form. Zox’s signature style—the splicing of a color field to give the sensation of shifting planes has evolved into the graceful looping patterns of his recent work. Zox is a distinctly American artist. From the Iowa heartland to inclusion in major museum exhibitions in the early 60’s, Larry Zox catapulted to fame. He helped define a generation of painters. Critic Peter Schjeldahl characterized Zox as a “painter’s painter.” Represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, the Hirschhorn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others, Larry Zox’ striking work affirms his intellectual rigor and the sheer joy of his engagement with paint.
In his paintings LLOYD MARTIN deals with the transformative nature of time and use, the alterations of the original logics of his environment - the post-industrial urban setting of his studio. Martin begins his process by photographing his immediate surroundings, yet that influence may be detected only in a color situation or a spatial metaphor. His compositions reflect synthetic rhythms such as the serrations found in ventilation or heating units, or alterations of architectural situations. His work reflects the pleasures of symmetry as found in nature or the constructed.
A distinctly fresh new vision has emerged from artist NOBU FUKUI’S own experience spanning two cultures. Born in Japan, yet for many years a part of the New York art world, Fukui has a very contemporary sensibility steeped in the iconography of popular culture that appeals to both East and West. Oil paint, acrylics, three-dimensional beads, collage, an allover grid of graphite, sumi ink of the kind used by calligraphers, these are some of the ingredients of his exciting new work. In a feature article in Art in America critic Carter Ratcliff writes, Fukui “blends a virtuoso control over his materials with an inexhaustible willingness to improvise.”
LINDA STOJAK’S paintings may be thought of as “psychological self-portraits.” Her iconography is the human body. She uses the human form as a metaphor - stark, haunting, and spiritually resonant. Her work emerges out of a great tradition of painting and yet stands as uniquely her own. Linda Stojak’s paintings are an exploration of the very essence of what it is to be human. Her work is a highly charged yet subtle exploration of the personal, characterized by immediacy, and a palpable painterly quality, and marked by a disquieting beauty.
JOHANNES GIRARDONI is an Austrian-born artist of exceptional talent. He juxtaposes rough wood and lusciously sensuous encaustic in his work. The wax, so rich and redolent evokes a sense of longing, even hunger, in the observer. He melds pigments of richness and depth in his wax, in surprising tonalities and colors. In a feature article in the current issue of Sculpture, Peter Lodermeyer writes of Girardoni’s work: “The opposites embodied by Girardoni’s sculpture are most clearly revealed in the contrast of his preferred working materials, beeswax and wood…By combining both materials it is possible for him to formulate a considerable number of formal oppositions that preserve the tension of the work: smooth wax surfaces and cracked wood, color and colorlessness, open and closed, things found and things formed, fullness and void.” Girardoni is currently also represented in the European traveling exhibition: Personal Structures.
The work of KATHY MOSS focuses obsessively on natural elements—she explodes them in huge scale images and floats them in spare, stark, sensuous surfaces so that they are revealed as highly provocative suggestions of her vision of natural elements -reduced, blown up, revealed.
RON EHRLICH’S paintings are the result of his dynamic technique of hands-on manipulation of his work. Years spent in Japan studying the art of ceramics at a monastery profoundly influenced Ehrlich’s approach to painting. He uses surprising materials such as stucco, crayon, and marble dust along with oil paint and burns the surface of the work, melding parts of his paintings in an intensely sophisticated palette revealing his gifted vocabulary as a colorist.
“From a distance [JOHNNIE WINONA ROSS’S] canvases appear to be simple, minimal constructions of horizontal stripes with hints of vertical color in the background. Up close the paintings are seen to be extraordinarily beautiful and complex objects that induce a humming meditative state,” (Stephen Parks, The Washington Post.) Ross’s work reveals itself slowly and only on close inspection. An apparently pristine surface buffed to perfection by a Pueblo potter’s stone reveals layers and layers and layers of subtle depths underneath. The dominant horizontal lines or bars in white and off white give way to a scintillating vertical world in the colors of a desert winter. Both the architecture and the intellectual rigor of the work evoke music as a metaphor.
French-born artist MICHEL ALEXIS explores language and the written word in his work. Painting and incising marks through the surface of gesso-soaked paper-on-canvas he constructs an evocative new language of the imagination. His use of nearly transparent paper in pale skin tones toys with the provocative, the transgressive, and the playful. Critic Jonathon Goodman in Art in America wrote of Alexis’ work: “The mystery of the painting is considerable; it is as if the artist has worked out a primal language of abstraction that makes sense on an intuitive level.”
Paris-based Swiss photographer, CATHERINE GFELLER negotiates the boundaries between intimacy and isolation, public and private life in her work. Gfeller captures the human element in a blur of cityscape. She is an artist who embraces the digital revolution incorporating a range of new approaches: working in stills, video and computer generated effects and printing on sheets of fine watercolor paper. Critics often use musical analogies in discussing her work. Gfeller herself states, “I feel more like a composer who likes to work in images, in associations, repetitions, superimpositions, rather than a photographer who isolates a single image.”
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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