As the winter winds are set to billow across
Lake Ontario, a wind of a different sort has already blown into Buffalo’s
Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It came in the form of a new director, Louis
Grachos, who arrived this past January. Grachos has introduced several new
initiatives calculated to reinvigorate the gallery, including a refocused
approach to the gallery’s world-renowned collection of modern and contemporary
art.
           So the gallery is
reinstalling its permanent collection and repainting its walls. No longer are
they a freshened-up modernist white. Instead, you’ll find colors ranging from a
grayish wedgwood blue to a bluish dove gray — colors appropriate to
International Style buildings, such as the Gordon Bunshaft-designed 1962
building that houses much of the permanent collection.
           The wall colors
dramatically enhance the art work — whether it’s a 19th-century Impressionist
painting or a late 20th-century sculptural sink by Robert Gober. Paintings like
Jasper Johns’ Numbers in Color (1958-59) take on a completely new life. Its blues and reds are intensified,
asserting the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, while the numbers
themselves have somehow become almost three-dimensional.
           If the
reinstallation is not enough to jumpstart visitor appeal, then the gallery’s
current exhibitions offer an exciting, if not provocative and challenging,
array of works by prominent contemporary artists that should surely entice.
           In discrete
gallery spaces whose walls were formerly graced by the likes of august Old
World painters like Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix, you’ll find two
temporary exhibitions of work by Janine Antoni (through February 1) and Kara
Walker (through February 8), which include recent acquisitions — no doubt the
contemporary continuation of what Grachos referred to as “the thoughtful and
daring patronage of people such as [A. Conger] Goodyear and of Seymour Knox
Jr.”
           Both Antoni and
Walker are makers of objects — whether the object is a silver cast of the
inside of the artist’s mouth and palm of her mother’s hand, or a series of
screen prints in the style of Victorian-era black paper cutouts. And it is the
made object, or making of an object,
that unites six artists — Petah Coyne, Leslie Dill, Ken Price, Tom Sachs,
Jeanne Silverthorne, and Fred Tomaselli — in another temporary exhibition, Materials, Metaphors, Narratives.
           Thematically
cohesive, visually and intellectually engaging, each artist’s work commands one
or more of the special exhibition gallery spaces and weaves in and out of the
serious and not-so-serious.
           Admitting to
being “seduced by religion,” Petah Coyne obsessively and intricately compiles
silk flowers, bows, tassels, velvet, lace, pearls, candles, branches, metal
wire, and more under delicate, drippy blankets of wax to create meditations on
the dualities of life — life-death, black-white, good-bad, fragile-strong,
funny-serious. There also seems to be a little free association thrown in for
good measure.
           Untitled #1165 (Paris Blue) is a waxy,
bluish-black pile of lots of silk flowers, some feathers, and a few tassels,
plus a little chicken wire and blue velvet. As an object in space, it looks
like a blackened mound of dirt from a freshly dug grave in front of a
Celtic-inspired headstone. The black color and grave-like appearance is only
contradicted by a humorous anecdote the artist provides for the audio tour.
Coyne talks about how the inspiration for this piece came from the revelation
that her friend Anne at Galerie Lelong (Coyne’s New York gallery) was going to
go to Paris. She recalls thinking about Paris, about how beautiful, how fun,
but then also recalls how sad, how “blue” she will be when Anne is gone.
           Nearby is Untitled #961S99-01 (Mary/Mary). Rising
to just beneath the high ceiling, a creamy white shrouded figure seems to push
through from behind a lean-to of plastered drywall. The figure’s pleated mantle
cascades into the viewer’s space — not unlike the long trail of a wedding
gown — and the surrounding floor space is strewn with white waxy flowers. The
look is random, the reality is anything but. A sense of quiet elegance and
reverence momentarily overcome you. Virgin Mary, virgin bride, pregnant bride,
pregnant Virgin… Irreverent? Maybe. Humorous? Definitely. The “pregnant” figure
is pregnant from the back. These idiosyncratic constructions become metaphoric
narratives on the material collision of conflicting emotions.
           Although not an
overtly humorous exhibition, humor, or the use of humor to communicate the
serious, has a palpable presence. Jeanne Silverthorne likes rubber because it
can be both industrial and flesh-like, and therefore, funny, because it is has
no spine, no backbone. Scale is also very important. In Under a Cloud, a small, worrisome figure made out of colorless
rubber sits beneath a big, gooey-looking, pendulous lump of a cloud. The
figure’s hairdo sticks out in all directions… Is she just having a bad hair
day or is there more to it? (What does feeling look like? How dowe visualize emotion?)
           While
Silverthorne is admittedly “not a high colorist,” Ken Price uses clay to create
amorphous sculptural bodies alive with tiny vibrant dots and squiggles of
painstakingly applied color. While color is very important to his work, neither
the choice of colors nor the work itself has social or political content. His
objects are what they are — quirky and whimsical — and it is up to the
viewer to decide what, if anything, they might be. This is not to say they
shouldn’t be taken seriously, since, at least according to Price, “most serious
art has humor — if not, it’s not serious.”
           Fred
Tomaselli’s collaged paintings are pretty funny, too, but don’t let that fool
you into thinking they’re not serious. Like Coyne, Price, and others, Tomaselli
is very process oriented. He combines magazine and picture-book cutouts of
flowers, birds, butterflies, eyes, lips, hands, and cannabis leaves with real
and painted pharmaceutical drugs to create abstract and representational
composite images encapsulated in resin — not unlike the composite heads by
the 16th-century Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. In this way, Tomaselli
says he’s “allowing people to use drugs… but in a completely safe, inverted
way… Instead of through the bloodstream to affect consciousness, they travel
through the eyeballs.”
           Though the
narratives conveyed may vary from artist to artist and viewer to viewer, these
six artists have succeeded in communicating the otherwise intangible on a
simple and visceral level.
Materials,
Metaphors, Narratives: Work by Six Contemporary Artists is on display
at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Avenue,
Buffalo, through January 4. Hours: Tuesday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 5
p.m.; Sunday 12 to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays. Admission: Adults, $8; students and
seniors, $6; members and children 12 and under, free. Free admission to the
permanent collection on Saturdays, 11a.m. to 1 p.m. Info: 716-882-8700.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2003.
