You might also like:
Michela Martello, in “The Divine, The Passion, and the Magic”
Visitor Center, Newburgh, New York, June 24 to August 19, 2023
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.
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sep 24, 2017–Jan 28, 2018
Diana Al-Hadid: “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things
Kasmin Gallery, New York, November 2 – December 22, 2023
Al-Hadid is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid emigrated to the United States when she was five years old, growing up in Ohio. There she received a BA at Kent State and then went on to earn an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The exhibition work spans a number of media, including rigid board, styrene, bronze, and wax. Commenting on the mythological content of the subject matter, the gallery writes:
“Across Al-Hadid’s use of motifs in this exhibition—which includes figures from Greek mythology alongside protagonists in Islamic and Christian narratives—the artist’s contemporary interpretations intuitively navigate different attempts of reading the future through our past. Constructions in nature such as mountains and caves reappear as emblematic elements of landscape tied to the social, psychological, and religious narratives that have been absorbed into dominant culture over the centuries. Indifferent to where these narratives find their origin in theology, Al-Hadid’s method of retrieving stories both communicate with history and imagine them anew. At once prophetic and autobiographical, Al-Hadid’s sensitive installation across two sites of the gallery’s architecture articulates a realm that manifests, both physically and metaphorically, above ground and below.”
Tadaaki Kuwayama: 1932-2023.
Marlborough Gallery, New York, Nov 9 2023 to January 13 2024.
