Henry Gregg Gallery With Spring comes an important opportunity for every New Yorker: the chance to venture outside and enjoy the city without the thick, wintry skin of sweaters, coats, hats, gloves and scarves.
JUMP!, now showing at the Henry Gregg Gallery, documents our sense of movement with a diverse group of works from nine artists that span three generations and two continents.
The most elemental sense of movement is captured in the work of Serena Bocchino and Eleanor Schimmel.
Their works are physical records of paint moving in drips and splatters across the canvas.
While Bocchino works in an abstract idiom that references the free-form improvisations of jazz, Schimmel's use of paint is more literal. Her drips in this work from the diving board series show water as splashes of paint, blurring the distinction between the medium and its subject.
Schimmel's work also alludes to another theme: the apparent movement of one's subject.
Alice Plusch's "Down by the Seaport" shows the reflection of a seascape in a smoked glass high rise. The work is of an image that moves from ocean upward, off the building and finally to the artist's eye. Consequently, Plusch renders the seascape as an abstraction created by the physical world.
Similar is Nola Zirin's "Neon After Dark." Another seascape, this one is at night. Rendered as though paint has been pushed across the surface, the work captures the movement of waves on the water. The difference between the liquid water and the viscous paint is aptly blurred. Going deeper still, other artists in the show explore movement between the physical space and the psychological space. As images jump from one realm to another, they change form, becoming something that is new but still recognizable.
Ai Ohkawara's work explores the subconscious and its rise to the surface of both the body and the canvas. Her images of bare bodies are stretched across the canvas and they appear to be fabric themselves. Earthy browns and greys are contrasted by bright pinks and purples. This choice of colors reflects the movement from the dark subconscious upward and suggests the delicate balance required to bring darker thoughts to light.
Carol Bruns's busts of characters from her dreams are nearly monumental in size, but diminutive in scope. Each work stands as an intimidating monolith from a larger, missing narrative that can only be glimpsed. She describes her works as those in which a "world of dreams unfurls." Anne Raymond also explores this movement between psychological space and physical space, but in the opposite direction. Her abstract paintings bear the names of places, such as "Oval Office." Her nomenclature reveals the works to be internalized emotional impressions that have been pressed into her psyche by physical spaces. With each painting, an environ comes full circle as it is made anew on the canvas.
Rising from the plane of the painting are also works by Joan Grubin and Helen Brough.
Grubin's work of circles of paper affixed to the wall is a snapshot of effervescence, which brings to mind refreshing high dives and cold, carbonated beverages. The paper is colored on one side allowing the artist to explore the "relationship between the frontal plane and the colored glow."
Helen Brough's work consists of boxes of transparent plates, each painted. Some of these layers are abstract; some are clearly representations of buildings. The artist describes the works as a "fabricated progression of time" and "imagined forecasts of monuments," as the images jump from plane to plane, while still contributing to the whole of the work.
