Contributed by Suzanne Joelson / I needed to write about Michele Abramowitz to understand the uncanny allure of her paintings, now on view at Kate Werble Gallery. She brings life, or something like it, to familiar conventions. Shifts in figure and ground trick the eye as it negotiates improbable terrain, that looks more like a dream than a product of twentieth-century formalism. Resemblances abound, shift, dissolve, mimic, repeat. Each painting is at once assuring and destabilizing.
Tag: Hiroshige
Donna Moylan’s egalitarian eclecticism
Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / “Recent Paintings,” Donna Moylan’s first exhibition at Bookstein Projects, collects works finished over the last year in her Kinderhook studio. In our email conversation, Moylan said that “sometimes paintings take years, as if they had to go off and think.” In addition to making paintings that carry time in the process of their production, she forgoes committing to a serial style, allowing her paintings to differ drastically from one to the next. “When I started doing that, in the nineteen-eighties,” she wrote, “I understood that what I wanted was to equalize, or make equivalent, many different styles of painting, and to refer to different cultures or eras with specificity but without differentiation or emphasis, without focusing on ‘styles.’” She has achieved this goal with considerable aplomb.