Sometimes its presence is only implied, as in Panteha Abareshi’s “A Mistranslation” (2022), an assemblage of assistive and prosthetic devices and wires whose pastel colors bring an unexpected playfulness to something clinical. Unsurprisingly, the body is a dominant subject. ![]() But what the show lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in visibility and variety, in the pleasure of the works themselves and of making connections among them. The theme is broad (as happens with many summer group shows), and the result is a bit of a jumble. The impetus for the exhibition “ Pure Joy” was the title: The actor and artist Chella Man invited 14 disabled artists, who are often expected to speak about the challenges they face, to instead celebrate happiness. A perfectly unfinished quality, like the dialogue captured here between old and new. Much like Grewal’s work, Omuku creates the impression of beautiful figuration distilled from some ethereal miasma of dreams. My favorite painting here is Nengi Omuku’s “The Lighthouse” (2021), unstretched and painted on sanyan, a traditional Nigerian woven fabric. In her unreal landscape, figures fall from, while some climb, a cliff side with monsters lurking below. Ghostly and sketchy, they neatly match the melancholy energy of Leonora Carrington’s “Composition (Ur of the Chaldees)” (1950), on the opposite end of the same wall. It wasn’t just the claps of thunder and the white-noise rush of rain that made Jake Grewal’s paired paintings (both 2022) of figures in murky forest scenes so transfixing. Disrupting this suite of 1960s power painters is the moody “Orbiter” (2022) by the British artist Louise Giovanelli, a sequined sheath dress torso rendered in a style recalling Marilyn Minter. The painting shares a wall with two majestic Lee Krasners from 1964 and a tall and slender Helen Frankenthaler, “Wine Dark” (1965), with its titular color saturating the canvas’s right side. Howardena Pindell’s “Space Frame #2” (1969) features a white grid on canvas upon which cream and pastel ovals seem to move diagonally about its surface, as if pulled or repelled from the corners. The exhibition inside elucidates how the history of abstraction pours through contemporary representational painting. I ducked into Kasmin Gallery before a volley of thunder signaled a deluge of rain. PPOW Gallery, 392 Broadway, Manhattan 21,. Most of the works I’ve already mentioned, however, take color for a serious test-drive, suggesting that, in the realm of “blunt facts,” some aspects of painting are more complex, nuanced and complicated than others. ![]() Paintings by Meena Hasan, Theresa Daddezio and Dan Walsh feel like tutorials in color theory. Color is employed in dizzying, hallucinogenic and marvelous ways throughout the show. The artists’ approaches to color are the real showstoppers here. Materials are put to the test in James Hyde’s fresco on Styrofoam reliefs, Rochelle Feinstein’s banner-style painting made with spray paint and embroidery, Lisa Beck’s burned canvas and Sarah Braman’s sculpture with a wood base and tinted glass panes. ![]() Approaches to space - positive, negative and beyond - are central to paintings by Robert Bordo and Craig Taylor. Connections between art and technical images are extended in Dennis Delgado and Benny Merris’s inkjet prints and in the painterly, abstract 16-millimeter film by the duo Blinn and Lambert. In the current show, expanded into sculpture and photography, Marina Kappos shows how acrylic paint can be layered and spread across the canvas to create perceptual effects that mimic photography and other visual mediums.
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