Review: Edith Schloss's Deep Cheer

Edith Schloss, Blue Italian Skies Above, 1968, oil on canvas, 11 3/4 x 31 1/2 inches

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson

As the title “Blue Italian Skies Above” suggests, walking into the exhibition of Edith Schloss’s paintings now at Alexandre Gallery produces a kind of pastoral contentment. Many of the paintings depict a swatch of Italian beach to which she decamped from Rome – her primary home from 1962, when she left New York, until her death in 2011. A tranquil blue seems dominant in her palette, and the phenomena she presents in her calculatedly primitive pastiches – flowers, butterflies, tablecloths, tchotchkes, the sun, the moon, occasionally what looks phallic – can all be associated with good vibes of one kind or another. Don’t be fooled into thinking she was a shallow, acquiescent Pollyanna, though. Lurking in that casual lightness is a distinct quality of mortality and limitation.

The sense of that quality is not tragic but rather stoic – maybe wistful but resolutely short of sentimental. As she reveals in her posthumously published memoir The Loft Generation, she was far from clueless. She decried the diminution of women in the “what the fuck man’s land” of the New York art scene in the 1950s, and later the difficulty of being taken seriously as an artist while earning a living as an art writer and critic. When her work comes under closer scrutiny, the blue cheer of the 20 paintings yields to mood shifts, conveyed by changing seasons, weather, or time of day, rendered with elegant simplicity, and echoed in Schloss’s titles.

“Edith Schloss: Blue Italian Skies Above,” Alexandre Gallery, 291 Grand Street, LES, New York, NY. Through June 4, 2022.

The new theatrical space of Amy Lincoln

Amy Lincoln, installation view. Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

Originally published by Two Coats of Paint
Contributed by Jason Andrew

 Amy Lincoln’s Soaring trajectory has locked in the natural world, the phenomena within it, and the epic world of myth. Ten new paintings now on view at Sperone Westwater embrace these pervasive elements while exploring a bold new theatrical space.

I first met Lincoln well over a decade ago and have curated several shows that included her work. As a recent grad of Tyler School of Art (Stanley Whitney was one of her instructors), she had just returned from short teaching stint in Yokohama, Japan, and was living in a fourth-floor walkup loft above a laundromat at Melrose and Central in Bushwick. A bunch of artists had landed there including Jesse Bercowetz, Ianthe Jackson, Kevin Curran (now married to Lincoln), and Ben Godward. They were part of the genesis of Bushwick’s nascent but growing art scene, and Lincoln was its Henri Rousseau.

She has always had a highly stylized approach to her work. Even back then, we came to appreciate her offset proportions, one-point perspective, and use of sharp chromatic color in her small portraits of friends, still lifes of plants, and well-placed interiors on MDF. Lincoln’s distinctive approach to painting bordered on the primitive, leaving one with a sense of mystery and eccentricity.

As the complexity of her paintings grew, they moved beyond mere observation into the realm of phenomenology and meaning. Her panels expanded to include landscapes teeming with flora and fauna bathed in the sun, the stars, the moon, or a combination of the three. By resolutely skirting human truths and contradictions in terms of imagery, her work paradoxically seemed to embrace them remotely in suggesting themes such as urban isolation and alienation.

“I find myself trying to figure out how realistic things should be versus imaginatively depicted,” Lincoln said in a 2019 interview with Maria Vogel. “I think whatever makes the painting more compelling is what I try to choose. There’s a range within a painting. Some things are more realistic, other things more like symbols.”

Pam Glick’s code theory

Pam Glick, installation view

Pam Glick, installation view

Originally Published by Two Coats of Paint
Contributed by Jason Andrew

Artists often have generative strategies for jumpstarting a work. The AbExers’ had their automatism and the minimalists had their procedural arrangements. For her new paintings, on display at The Journal Gallery in their rotating “Tennis Elbow” series, Pam Glick seems to embrace both the automatic and the procedural.

I’m a huge fan of the sci-fi action film The Matrix. When Keanu Reeves’ character Neo begins to intuitively translate the binary numeric system cascading down a post-apocalyptic computer screen, the film gains momentum. Staring intensely at Glick’s paintings I found a way into her work—by thinking about code theory.

Glick has been celebrated for her “improvisational flair,” and for many years her paintings have been compositionally based on a matrix. Densely painted, the new paintings incorporate painted marks that are sectioned into rows that generate linear combinations. Through multiple works, there is a single band of painted information uniquely chroma-keyed to the surrounding fields. This single vertical row space serves as a generator-matrix, driving the narrative of a given painting towards a final resolution. As in The Matrix, these bands seem to reference the “real world” as distinct from a controlled and regulated one – privileged moments of consciousness within Glick’s matrix.

Jason Andrew reviews Joan Snyder at CANADA

Joan Snyder, installation view. Left: Ode to Summer (2019); Right: Weeping Cherry Tree & Thee (2020) / Courtesy CANADA

Contributed by Jason Andrew

In a 1976 Cincinnati Enquirer review of Joan Snyder’s paintings, the reviewer, Owen Findsen, surmised that she had “picked up a little of this, a little of that … and made it all uglier.” While he found her work offensive, even questioning it’s validity, for those like me who have come to love Snyder’s work, it couldn’t be a bigger compliment. Joan Snyder paints her world from the inside out.

Unabashedly expressive, her paintings are born of sorrow and moods, loss and struggles, and yes, peace and love as well. The new paintings now on view at CANADA echo a familiar cantata – an unapologetic narrative. “They are a form of keeping time,” Helen Molesworth writes in her witty catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition, “of remaining present, of acting as both observer and recorder.” The catalogue also features commentary by Wallace Whitney and Sean Scully.

Consistent throughout her work since the 1960s is Snyder’s use of a “stroke” – a heavy gesture succinctly pulled horizontally. Conceived as an alternative to the Great God Grid, this mark can be interpreted as a cancellation, a kind of crossing out. At first, at least, it was distinctly her own. Each stroke works in tandem with saturated orbs, scribbles, and textured elements of collage. While overtly physical, her paintings, often multi-paneled, are not lost to the oblivion of expression.

Snyder has always been outspoken, and her paintings are a kind of glorious outrage. When asked by Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven to describe her art and its relationship to Feminism in 1977, she responded with an associative fusillade:

layers, words, membranes, cotton, cloth, rope, repetition, bodies, wet, opening, closing repetition, lists, life stories, grids, destroying grids, houses, intimacy, doorways, breasts, vaginas, flow, strong, building, putting together many disparaging elements, repetition, red, pink, black, earth feel colors, the sun, the moon…

The exhibition features a return to a common theme for Snyder, that of her “Field Series.” These works, painted in her studios in Woodstock and Brooklyn, continue to be about the sacred, the serene, fields of moons, moons in mud, rippling ponds, landscapes stretched out, and daily diaries exposed. These lush visions tell powerful stories.

Jason Andrew reviews Rachael Gorchov at Owen James Gallery

Contributed by Jason Andrew

There is a long history of artists expanding the objectness – that is, the sculptural dimension – of painting. Picasso and Braque introduced this concept in their assemblage works; Vladimir Tatlin broadened it in his “counter-reliefs” alongside Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoventhe, the “Dada Baroness”. For the Dadaists, breaking the picture plane meant breaking tradition, embracing chaos, and rejecting logic.

Decades later, as hardcore ideologies dissipated, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Murray, and many others explored the plasticity of painting in more playful and less doctrinaire ways. In her recent work, Rachael Gorchov revisits old ideologies but with an eye to establishing a new framework for painting. Gorchov is clearly interested in the traditional concerns of color, gesture, and pictorial space. And much like her cousin twice removed, the painter Ron Gorchov – whom she only met in adulthood – Rachael has developed a distinct structure for her work.

Although she was already working in ceramic around 2010, I first encountered her concave paintings (made through a combination of mixed-media including papier-mâché and clay) in a solo show she called “Convex Chromascope” at Hunter College in 2015. Her 2017 solo at Owen James (then in Greenpoint) represented a turning point in her work, as brushstroke and shape coalesced into a uniquely warped mise en scène.

Gorchov has incorporated vinyl printing (high-quality scans of paintings on paper) into her compositions. Mimicking a drop shadow as it cascades from a physical sculpture, the vinyl extends the work’s visual space and drama, confirming its strictly physical flatness while introducing the illusion of motion – just as the sun passing overhead designates time. Jennifer Bartlett’s paintings of the late 1980s incorporated sculptural elements that similarly extended their narrative. Although Gorchov’s work is much smaller in scale, her strategy is just as ambitious as Bartlett’s. And much like Bartlett’s sculptural features, Gorchov’s vinyl is a sardonic reminder of modern painting’s literalness.

Gorchov’s recent exhibition at Owen James Gallery (now located on Wooster Street in Soho), opened on the cusp of the COVID-19 outbreak, and I saw the show just days before it closed in early August. It featured nine wall-mounted works and two works installed on the floor. Gorchov now describes her work as “sculptural painting.”