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At the Galleries with Bascove
Featuring New York Artists & Galleries
With Solo exhibitions at the Museum of the City of New York, the Arsenal in Central Park, the Municipal Art Society, the Hudson River Museum, NYU Fales Library, and The National Arts Club, Bascove has documented and celebrated the wondrous Bridges of New York City. She has worked with The New York, Brooklyn, and Roosevelt Island Historical Societies, and has lectured and arranged events with the Museum of the City of New York, the Central Park Conservancy, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Municipal Art Society, NYU Fales Library, and the Hudson River Museum. Her work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including: the Museum of the City of New York, the MTA Arts for Transit, the Rachofsky Collection, the Norwalk Transit District, Time Warner, the Oresman Collection, and the Musée of Cherbourg. Three collections of her paintings, accompanied by anthologies of related writings: Sustenance & Desire: A Food Lover's Anthology of Sensuality and Humor (2004), Where Books Fall Open: A Reader’s Anthology of Wit and Passion (2001), a 2002 Book Sense Selection; and Stone and Steel: Paintings and Writings Celebrating the Bridges of New York City (1998), have been published by David R. Godine. Her work can be viewed at Bascove.com.
BOUQUETS
Jane Freilicher at Tibor De Nagy
For those who thought we had missed the latest exhibition of the celebrated still lifes of Jane Freilicher, we’ve been given another chance by the extension of this small, but quietly powerful, show at Tibor de Nagy.
Freilicher’s training was in abstract expressionism, using color and form to find the energy of a painting. A painter’s painter, she is often referred to as the American Giorgio Morandi. Compositions are carefully constructed; the subject matter revised each time with freshness and subtlety. Astute variations of color always feel newly found, an instinctual searching for just the right shade and tone, with a concentration and texture comparable to Rothko’s. More unusual however, is that she is a poet’s painter. Her friendships with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and other literary figures reflect her own integration of art and poetic imagery. Joy and discovery, contemplation, and a judicious search for honesty infuse these works.
This is embodied in an exquisitely composed canvas, Bouquets. It shows an almost limited palate of yellow, yellow-greens and blues. Rose pinks act as a highlight of form, with a spiral of a pink flower balancing the right side. With a nuanced background of dark grey squares, a sensibility of harmony pervades.
Bouquets, 2011, oil on linen, 16” x 20” Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
Although these compositions play with the spatial tensions of inside and outside, there is always a place for the gaze to rest. The brief life and delicate loveliness of the flowers in the foregrounds tend to be of richer color and more highly defined than the more robust cityscapes and landscapes shown out the windows. Only on occasion, as in a painting titled Yellow- a symphony of hot yellows and golds, do these shapes merge and melt to become almost indistinguishable from each other.
In Study in Blue and Grey, a vase of ultramarine blue filled with white flowers, brilliantly glowing like the light of the moon, takes center stage. Surrounded by the pink, pale blues, and celery greens of a city’s hazy day, it has an intensity and luminosity that separates it not only from the background, but even the paler companion vase at its side.
Study in Blue and Gray, 2011, oil on linen, 24” x 24” Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
Freilicher’s lithographs present us with brilliant opaque and translucent color studies and her discriminating eye for arrangement. With simple, deft, strokes At Night contrasts the solidity of each container- glass, pottery, and clay nurturing the thick leaves of a succulent, with the transparency of the night sky and the anonymity of surrounding buildings.
At Night, 2011, color lithograph, 26 ½” x 26” Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York
The pleasures of these botanical portraits are infused with a primal harbinger of time; the uncountable variations of changing light. Freilicher is fluent in the language of the hours of illumination and darkness; she is our learned guide to the distinctions of the light of late morning, early afternoon, dusk, and evening. Each moment, no matter how quiet, how private, receives it’s praise.
"When I start painting, it's with this rush of feeling — an emotional reaction to something I find beautiful in the subject, which provides the energy, the impetus to paint. Then, as the process of painting evolves, other things enter into it — a discovery of what it is I think I'm seeing." Jane Freilicher
Jane Freilicher: Recent Paintings and Prints will be at Tibor de Nagy Gallery until June 3rd, 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10019, 212-262-5050
Recommended reading:
Jane Freilicher by Klaus Kertess & John Ashbery, Harry N. Abrams 2004
