Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Manet/Degas
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Christopher Wool
Guggenheim, New York Oct 25 to January 22 2014
Eric Fischl “Portraits”
Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Feb to March 17, 2012
Kim McCarty: New Work
Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, October 26 to December 9, 2017.
Kim McCarty’s new watercolors are, as always, a masterclass in the “uncontrolled” controlled.
Her process involves working on wet paper, which gives her figures (mostly adolescents and botanical forms) this ghostly, translucent quality where the edges seem to be dissolving even as you look at them. There’s a specific kind of tension in these works; because the paint bleeds so freely, every mark feels like a gamble. In this new series, her palette remains muted. Washes of sepia, dusty rose, and bruised blues. These heighten the sense of vulnerability in her subjects. The figures aren’t just portraits; they are meditations on the instability of youth and the body. They feel less like solid things and more like memories that haven’t quite finished fading. It’s a beautiful, fragile show that reminds you how much power there is in the medium.
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.