In a period in which America’s political, social and environmental certainties are being steadily eroded and dismantled, cutting edge art is needed more than ever to lead us to explore our feelings and hone our critical skills. Three solo exhibitions at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) by painter Nicole Wittenberg, sculptor Elizabeth Atterbury and installation artist Carlie Trosclair demand that the art audience steadfastly question appearances and explore our inner experience. Only with our brains fully engaged can we creatively overcome or adapt to the alarming dislocations and disruptions confronting us both at home and afar.
In the lofty daylit hall abutting the entrance to the CMCA, Wittenberg’s supersized, semi-abstract oil paintings, intensely pigmented and charged with flaming orange, leap out at the viewer. Invited by CMCA curator emeritus and former director Suzette McAvoy, Wittenberg expressly created her “Cheek to Cheek” series for this lofty space. Each gargantuan work, expanding on a small gestural pastel drawing, evokes in exaggerated scale and agitated brushstroke the picturesque hydrangea and climbing roses typical of Maine summers. The images, cropped and compressed at the edges of the 10-to-12-foot-tall canvases, thrust the viewer into a total environment pulsing with excitement and possibly danger.
(Wittenberg is concurrently displaying more architecturally scaled paintings in Paris at the Fondation Le Corbusier’s Maison la Roche and is also featured in “A Sailboat in the Moonlight,” a retrospective at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art of her sketches and mid-sized paintings, through July 20.)