Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China

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.