Assembled Abstractions Opens

On Friday, March 13th AxD Gallery’s exhibition, Assembled Abstractions, opened. Artists Barbara Klein and Michael Smith got a chance to meet each other for the first time. It was good to see many new and familiar faces in the gallery after what seemed to have been far too long of a Winter. Our window display featured artworks from both Michael and Barbara, hung on cable-suspended panels painted in Spring-like shades of green. The colorful window and lively crowd inside attracted people into the gallery as they walked along 10^th Street that night. Friday the 13^th turned out to be a perfect day to have an art opening.

At first glance it isn’t obvious that the exhibition Assembled Abstractions features the paintings by two Philadelphia area artists who had never previously met. The gestalt of these two bodies of work is a shared one — the visceral delight of abstract tales told through highly chromatic painted collages. An unabashed joy of color and pattern transmutes the personal reminders of marked time and life experiences of Barbara Klein and Michael Smith into paintings of pure gold.

Beyond the initial impression of a shared language, a closer probing of the nearly three dozen small paintings featured in Assembled Abstractions reveals a great diversity of technique, inspirations and motifs. Michael Smith, a Tyler graduate, applies his training as a printmaker to his work which draws him toward lines and patterns he sees in everyday life. Land forms as seen from airplanes, such as the lines of a plowed field, the arrangement of a golf course, playing fields, suburban housing developments, and snaking rivers have found their place in Michael’s painted imagery. His work betrays a cubistic sensibility while often evoking the density of an Eastern Indian miniature.

The works of Barbara Klein, a graduate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, are more spare by contrast. Her colors, equally bold, ranging from fuscia, yellow, and aqua, are deployed alongside black and greys to form hard-edge patterns and ambiguous poetic objects. Stripes, dots, amoebic and calligraphic forms all pervade her work. Her works frequently seem as color field miniatures, but are often composed as diptychs or triptychs. Barbara puts an idea down to see where it goes. Her work represents the end result of editing down of ideas that, at the onset, have gone nowhere. Sanding, scraping, and painting-over ideas help her resolve the piece, incrementally, without preconception.

“Nothing to Fear” Facade

Recently we were commissioned to do a design-build facade installation for Peter G.-Ray’s 2009 ‘Nothing to Fear’ painting exhibition at the Bridge Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Two years earlier we debuted his work in the U.S. at AxD Gallery with a solo show entitled ‘CUT’. For that exhibition we built rolled aluminum panels on the exterior of our gallery, creating the appearance of their being cut and peeled away.

Views of finished window at Bridge Gallery, and the painting "Cut" by Peter G.-Ray, displaying similarly hand-rolled aluminum panels.

The designs for both gallery fronts flowed as fairly direct extensions of the artist’s interests in concealing, cutting, peeling and revealing. In his work, openings, whether rendered physically in cut materials or graphically with painted surfaces, are invitations for engagement. Simply put, Peter’s work invites curiosity. As art critic Ken Moffett has noted: “G.-Ray has combined the hallucinatory surrealism of Dali with the vigor and freedom of Jackson Pollock, metamorphosing these into something startlingly new. He hungers to unite extremes: Precision and free improvisation, the intensely graphic and beautifully painted, exquisite refinement of detail and pictorial force.” All in all, there is plenty in Peter G.-Ray’s work to sustain interest and wonder.

Our design-build exercises to date have all been conducted as “charrettes” of a week or less. In the case of the Bridge Gallery façade installation we had the added constraint of performing all of the work in a single day, including round trip transportation from Philadelphia, with materials and equipment fitting inside a mid-sized sedan.

Fortunately working conditions were absolutely perfect. The weather was very mild for late February. The trickiest part of the project was securing our work to the Bridge Gallery without permanently altering the existing marble façade. We accomplished this by working the head and a jamb of our frame into existing security gate hardware and bolting the base into the concrete sidewalk. Interest in our installation piece increased dramatically as the first aluminum panels were screwed onto the frame. (See “before” and installation photos below.)

Neighboring shop owners, tourists and random passersby stopped to ask us what was going on. We handed out quite a few postcards for Nothing to Fear during that Spring-like afternoon. As we finished up at dusk, Peter G.-Ray was quite pleased with results … the debut for both of us in NYC. Two days later, it snowed at the March 1st opening reception!

www.bridgegalleryny.com