This fall Klaudia Marr Gallery in Santa Fe presented its 12th Annual Realism Invitational, showcasing thirty-five contemporary artists. As usual, the exhibition cast a wide net. Some artists use the figurative idiom to chronicle pop culture or comment on the state of society, as Kenny Mencher does in his 2004 oil Dog, depicting an alienated couple and their oversized pet in an updated Hopperesque interior. Others explore allegory. Steve Kenny’s The Wreath (2005) shows a nude young man holding aloft a wreath like an evergreen halo and beset by black-capped, bright yellow birds. In the same artist’s The Wing, bird and man have fused into a surreal hybrid. The always interesting Robert Brawley is showing tondo still lifes: Persephone, a triton’s trumpet shell lying like an odalisque on white drapery, and Portal: Threshold to Within and Without, a curious metal and sea creature grouping centering on a cropped image of Ingres nudes (both 2001). Elements of the legendary surface in Timur Tsaku’s oil-and-acrylic, black-and-white fantasies, such as Dancing on the Wind (2003), and Steve Smulka’s Shakti Source of All (2005), in which a dark-haired girl wrapped in a white studio drape warily eyes a trio of crows. Ron Kostoff’s Asylum #3 (2005) has the air of a Giorgio de Chirico. In a spaghetti-box format, a desolate moon looks down on the eponymous structure with its apertures boarded up or gaping black; a disused, aqua-color door tilts against the wall.
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Steven Kenny, The Wreath, 2005
Courtesy Klaudia Marr Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico |
Much of the work, of course, falls into traditional categories of representationalism: figure study, portrait, landscape, still life. Smulka has made a specialty of collections of clear glass vessels in sunlight, such as The Open Window and The Conversation (both 2005), that explore the play of light through curvy pitchers placed on a window sill. Suzy Smith also uses a clear, round glass vase in Peonies (2004), but by using the glass to distort a bold black-and-white-striped ground and adding a flamboyant red and white bouquet, she gives the whole composition Op Art punch. There are a number of excellent portraits in a variety of mediums. Aristides Ruiz uses ballpoint pen in his study Brooks (2005), delineating hair, beard and eyelashes with real finesse. Carol Mothner’s Elizabeth with Braces (2005) creates a velvety surface with graphite on vellum. John Nava’s Portrait of R. (2005), a close-up of a girl with intense eyes and undulating waves of hair, is a tapestry. Nava’s oil painting Artist Model (2005) depicts the same young woman, three-quarter length, wearing a wonderful black-and-white kimono. Several artists take a new look at botanical art. Susan McDonnell sets realistically depicted flowers in amorphous painterly spaces, using egg tempera. The stemless white blossom of Bloom (2005) floats in a cosmic pale blue void, accompanied by an insect. In Damselfly (2005) plant and insect hover in a painterly field of red. Margie Kuhn makes elegant trompe l’oeil watercolors, such as Fauna & Flora #2 (2005), a rosebud “taped” to the paper and two diaphanous-winged flies, and American Sublime: Dandelion (2005), in which the “taped” objects including plant specimens and a farmland illustration. Exhibitions of this kind continue to document the variety and skills of artists working under the rubric of realism today.
Klaudia Marr Gallery, 668 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501. Telephone (505) 988–2100. On the web at www.klaudiamarrgallery.com
