Correspondences

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery presents a group exhibition of gallery artists, with a fresh perspective, highlighting correspondences amongst generations, pairing an older guard next to a younger group of contemporary artists. The show draws attention to their different approaches to timeless subject matter: from photography to collage, still life and landscape, where interior meets exterior, where representation meets abstraction, from observation to a mediated, conceptual approach to reproducing the world one sees & confronts.  This is the first time many of these artists are exhibited side-by-side.

The show opens with a colorful dialogue between Trevor Winkfield and John Ashbery, with Ashbery giving a nod to Joe Brainard. Brainard, Donald Evans and Jen Mazza explore a vehicle of communication by way of its trappings, the envelope. The collage and cut outs of John O'Reilly and Brainard bump up against each other in their juxtapositions of classic Greek sculpture and the eroticized male form, as ideal, object of contemplation and as pop advertisement.

Jess meticulously translates Egyptian drawings in graphite, inserting Krazy Kat cartoons into his overall image. The markers of an urban society long since passed are captured in the photographs of Rudy Burckhardt. Mazza faithfully reproduces an image of an old photograph. The formal systems of painting are interrupted by the superimposition of scribbled, script like line. Textural surface treatments respond and reflect in the conversations between the sculptures of Kathy Butterly and John Newman. Newman’s rough-hewn, slightly austere sculpture contrasts with the shimmery delicacy of Butterly’s fecund vessel.

Sarah McEneaney tilts the picture plane conveying memory and the life of the mind merge into exterior space. Vera Iliatova, Richard Baker and Larry Rivers' large-scale still life works are full frontal on the surface of the picture plane with landscape pushed to the background. With a flattened aerial view Ann Toebbe unpacks intimately populated domestic rooms. The grid of the window frame fuses with the view of her courtyard as Biala interlocks interior and exterior space like the warp and weft of fabric.

Rounding up these exchanges, we celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the collaboration between Rivers & Frank O’Hara on the famous suite of lithographs, Stones.