Nancy Nesvet’s photographs and large-scale oil paintings, on view alongside sculptures by Larry Ringgold in “enDANGERd” through November 16 at Washington, D.C.’s Zenith Gallery, take entirely different turns of portraying the sea. In the paintings, the sea is vast, changing and tumultuous: in the photographs, murky depths pull me to look closely at the details. Those details are both threatening and beautiful, making the photographs look like a coming environmental apocalypse. There is a masterful handle on scale in her paintings. We know polar bears to be substantial, but in Nesvet’s eight paintings, they are microscopic, appearing in the far distance, unreachable and not treacherous at all. The bears are stranded on icebergs broken off from the mother glacier, with strong seas pushing them apart. “If but all the seas rise up,” 48” x 58”, the unending seascape shows two polar bears, … [Read more...] about NANCY NESVET AND LARRY RINGGOLD: ENDANGERD AT ZENITH GALLERY
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Creativity to Enlightenment: Material Culture at Elga Wimmer Gallery
“Material Culture,” curated by Roya Khadjavi, on view from April 4 until April 18, 2019 at Elga Wimmer Gallery PCC in New York City’s Chelsea District features five Iranian-born artists now working in the United States: Aida Izadpanah; Dana Nehdaran; Maryam Khosrovani; Mayam Palizgir and Massy Nasser Ghandi. Providing a window into the history of Persian art forms, they appropriate the language of Persian miniatures and Chinese landscape painting and spatial orientation. They contemporize traditions of Persian art in new and creative ways while retaining and respecting age-old Persian forms. My walk around the gallery began with Massy Nasser Ghandi’s dark landscape paintings on porcelain, “An Interpretation of the Horizon.” Variegated colors, browns and blacks in images of land visible at night and white waves full of air holes laying on a blue-grey sea composed realistic but … [Read more...] about Creativity to Enlightenment: Material Culture at Elga Wimmer Gallery