Contemporary Art, Painting

Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio

Abstract sketch by Bridget Riley

Morgan Library, New York, June 23 through October 8, 2023.

I have never really considered that preparatory drawings might be an important part of Bridget Riley’s workflow, but this exhibit at the Morgan proves it. The works are all donated for the show by the artist herself, from her personal collection.

Riley is one of the most accomplished abstract artists of the period, and live in a middle range between Op Art and Minimalism. Seeing the discipline of these small sketches as generators of the larger finished ideas is a revelation.

The exhibition introduction notes that this is the first show of Riley’s drawings in fifty years.

Drawing is having an eye at the end of a pencil

-Riley

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Gary Hume

Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, New York November 10 to December 22, 2023

These new works are signature Gary Hume: slick, flat, and glossy. He explores his languid forms with household alkyd paint, leaning, in this case, toward abstraction. The shapes are seemingly unchallenging and easy to digest — is this the visual equivalent of Nickelback? — although the color palette has some interesting dissonance. The motif of swans heads is scattered through the paintings, but they are abstracted and non-specific in their storytelling.


The housepaint used is interesting as some of the early work that established his reputation is starting to effloresce, as house paint alkyd contains different sets of acids than fine arts paints. The substrate is aluminum, which Hume has found balances the need for a visually perfectly flat surface with lightness, strength, and stability.

The questions on this work revolve around the level of seriousness. Is this work glib? Is it overly stylized? Does it have a narrative tension? Not sure that this is much more than law firm conference room art.

Hume (England, 1962) works in both London and the Catskills, New York, although recently put the Catskills studio up on the market.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Michela Martello, in “The Divine, The Passion, and the Magic”

Visitor Center, Newburgh, New York, June 24 to August 19, 2023

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I was given a tour of the Visitor Center by the director Eva Zanardi, an eloquent advocate of the Center. It was a group show, but I attended to see the incredible installation by Michela Martello.

This installation is a collection of pieces she worked on during a fellowship in Taiwan, working on these divinities on large scale filter paper. The works subject and style is a riff on the local religious traditions, and feminine divinity, but worked across large sheets of luminous filter paper. The resulting light-soaked space formed by shaping the papers into a circle is at once monumental and ephemeral, spiritual and fleeting.

The effect combines a fascinating level of detail and inventiveness, which also shifts to larger architectural scale as an installation shaping the space. The enclosure and filtered light were gorgeous.

Martello is a surpremely gifted draftsman, she has a lovely sense of line and balance of detail to large gesture. The portraits of the figures receive the most careful and nuanced attention with line, with other areas rapidly worked to describe texture or pattern.

Martello is from Grosseto, Italy but now based in New York City. I became personally acquainted with her work through its representation by Pen and Brush, where she has contributed beautiful and inventive work.

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