Toward a 21st Century Abstraction
Back sixty years ago, some abstract leaning modernists locked out realism with: “You can’t copy nature.” Fast forward to 2021 to Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum’s exhibition Toward a 21st Century Abstraction. No figurative representation detected at first pass … or is there?
The museum’s location among oak woodland is stunning. Natural daylight fills gallery spaces through tall windows and clerestories. The 2013 heavyweight Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot exhibition within this space mirrored the setting. Nature everywhere – inside and out – a landscape painter’s dream.
Sammy Peters, Appearance: Controlled Purpose, mixed media on canvas
Curator Peter Frank (b. 1950) selected practicing abstract artists close to his age. With the exception of Sammy Peters (b. 1939), all are children of the Abstract Expressionist ‘50s, coming of age through the years of pop, color field, hard-edge, minimal, performance and photo realism.
Late in their careers, these painters are definitely in a groove, echoing others that came before, and making art their way. They pursue their vision outside of major metro art markets, settling for regional outposts in places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and Vermont. California being the only coast represented.
At the entry, small unframed paintings by Vermont’s Doug Trump set the tone. Threaded horizontal lines and blocked-in shapes hover, looking suspiciously like sky above and ground below, as in the piece, Yet.
Doug Trump, Hands On, oil, pencil, collage, ink on wood panel
Masquerading as studies, these painting-collages are surprisingly complete, containing a dense bravado of work many times their size. Richard Diebenkorn comes to mind in Visitor. These are beehive-busy and up to something with flat, angular pathways, windows and mysterious movements of all sorts.
Next, two artists’ work faces one another from long walls. Connie Connally, Texas-raised and MFA educated, upends the ‘don’t copy’ canon with nature references in her saturated Joan Mitchell-like tomes. Deep contrasts include water like movement in Falling Meadow II. Others are a deliberate dense foliage of color as in Wild Matilija.
On the opposite wall, Katherine Chang Liu’s work hangs in tan and ochre monochrome constructs. Textured mixed media on deep unframed panels, these have little of Connally’s color splashes. Triptych-like Separation hangs a curtain of symbols and partial text over a deep, rich, flat-as-a-wall center. A pair of sunburst flora faintly appear, growing on the surface above. Below the wall spills a 3D soup of goo-covered alphabet. This is real-world stuff set up in raw and uncooked Robert Rauschenberg-type form.
David Bailin, Party, charcoal colored-pencil pastel and coffee on prepared paper
In the main gallery, the five remaining artists are corralled. Bustling with energy, almost all the works appear in movement within their framed and unframed supports. Some paint dark edges on the surface along the perimeters, as if to keep the wildness contained.
Katherine Chang Liu, Separation, mixed media on panel
Sammy Peters anchors the high flying group with his large pieces of oil and mixed media on canvas. Quiet and subdued, like a still life glued to a table and somehow peacefully applied vertically against a window, he channels a flat edge-to-edge and top-to-bottom structure in the vein of Matisse and Mondrian, coloration ala Hockney.
Hiding under a veil of abstraction David Balin’s thin support material hangs loose and big. Peering through the fogs of pencil work these are about people engaging in activity, part of his performance art background, figures in a virtually colorless, hard to determine setting. Titles like Party help focus on what lies within.
Three others, Brad Ellis (encaustic, enamel and collage on birch), Jeri Ledbetter (oil, crayon and graphite on birch), and the 1940s surrealist flavored work of Wosene Worke Kosrof (acrylic on canvas and linen) vibrate and crowd the surface.
Brad Ellis, Aqua Terra #5, encaustic on birch
Jeri Ledbetter, Potere del Rosso, oil, crayon graphite on birch
Ellis has perhaps the most divergent imagery among his paintings, alternately hard and soft edges, chaotic color and contrasts. Water people would be drawn to the floating melodic blues of Aqua Terra #5.
Like Connally, Ledbetter is in the pure painting camp. Energetic and opaque, washed out, and drawn over with happy surprises in the process, including the little red square outline in the four-foot square Trovati.
Wosene Worke Kosrof, Beauty of Your Own IX , acrylic on linen
Wosene’s take mirrors the others in his use of ambiguity, visual symbols, text or text-like objects. Only he uses parts and pieces of his native Ethiopian alphabet. Looking through a briar patch darkly, he stages a loose organic plant with a framework of black and white – where yellow, green, orange, red and blue players move about within, teasing space with objects (is it on the surface or far away?) The small bright red sun dot in Beauty of Your Own IX was modified after the show’s catalog was produced – a living, continuing dialogue between the artist and his work. Wosene is perhaps closest to the Cubists in creating an illusion of space with almost recognizable elements from the real world.
Each artist has created a stage where their scripts of illusion perform. We’ve been invited to watch the actors and join in. When talking about her and Chang Liu’s work, artist Connie Connally commented that these paintings, this show, is filled with narratives. They have a vocabulary and language, a realism, all their own, she said. “It’s not a story until a viewer makes it complete.”
Toward a 20th Century Abstraction is on view at Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, July 8 to August 14, 2021.
COVER IMAGE: Connie Connally, Eventide, oil on canvas
