Contributed by Michael Brennan / A while ago, with a half dozen adventurous galleries operating, a new art corridor seemed to be emerging on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This made geographical sense. Brooklyn was reaching critical mass in terms of artist residents, and the street itself was long and central, with excellent public transportation access. And it was in that sweet spot between improving and gentrified, ready to turn. Sadly, this new scene dissolved almost as quickly as it emerged, with most of the galleries replaced by conventional boutiques. But 490 Atlantic, operated by artist Jim Edwards, has remained a steadfast presence. The gallery is currently hosting a fine three person show, somewhat generically titled “Elysian Fields,” that includes Jeffrey Bishop, Pam Cardwell, and Cathy Diamond.
Bishop has a broad, dynamic vocabulary of painted forms, but it’s his deft sense of placement that really animates his compositions. He situates signature swirls and whorls onto an intuitive scaffolding, invisible but sensed as a ghost might be. Bishop’s gift for suspending gesture recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s exacting arrangements in his black-and-white silkscreen paintings and David Salle’s flawless layouts. From this standpoint, Bishop’s core sensibility may be more collage than painting. It is also fitting to think of Bishop’s works in terms of monotype. They feel immediate and open, as radical as the monotypes of Edgar Degas, in their paradoxically resolute in-betweenness.
Bishop’s untitled WRB #1 (image at top) has a demonic twist reminiscent of the famous paleolithic cave painting known as The Sorcerer.
“Elysian Fields” also features the organic abstractions of Cathy Diamond, with her searching vine-like gesture, and Pam Cardwell, with her densely brushed color masses. All three painters are searching, pushing their personal envelopes.
Further down Atlantic, closer to the BQE, is Eleventh Hour Art, presenting a new program with Dream Archives, which includes Katelyn Alain, Kyung Kim, Mayowa Nwadike, Carter Shocket, and Xiangjie Rebecca Wu. Wu’s work here features Faulkner-esque childhood scenes of the now-vanished Yangtze riverside life in China. Kyung Kim makes large diaphanous paintings that are masterful in their transition from the architectural to the ethereal. At once strong and quiet, her work fits nicely with Chopin’s nocturnes. All five artists work effectively to render the ephemeral more corporeal.
In neighboring Dumbo. Platform reliably presents thoughtfully curated group exhibitions. The current one is “Embers,” with David Ambrose, Lauriston Avery, Nick Benfey, J.A. Feng, Dana Frankfort, Clare Grill, Jackie Saccoccio, and Michelle Segre. All the painting is engaging, from Frankfort’s distressed fuchsia wash, to Saccoccio’s coagulated gestural mass, to Grill’s pale gray rose. Especially captivating is the gallery’s back wall, with ink drawings by Segre, mainly a sculptor, and Ambrose’s pierced watercolor and gouache work on paper, foregrounded by Avery’s beautiful blanched, sponge-like plaster mesh sculpture.
Segre’s drawings appear to be images of her ecstatic, otherworldly sculpture, and possess a fantastical, near science-fiction quality that recalls the private worlds of Lee Bontecou. Apropos of such worlds, I got lost in the microcosmic delight of Ambrose’s work, both recto and verso, which is as intensely painstaking as a POW’s pinpricked toilet-paper diary, or Marie Antoinette’s legendary Bastille journal, reportedly written in secret with a needle.
In Manhattan, on the edge of Chinatown, I caught the striking work of Jordan Homstad at RainRain. Biology and technology remain genuine avant-garde subjects, beyond aesthetics, and Homstad explores their intersection via imagined personal morphologies, mostly informed by the deep-sea peculiarities of the ominous anglerfish. Their dramatic paintings’ depthless black backgrounds conjure the crushing depths of the ocean floor. Traces of impacted, unintelligible text remain visible in them, like the purposefully obscured lettering of Jasper Johns or Glenn Ligon. Homstad is a painting virtuoso, often mixing distinct techniques within a single piece. Their work is thoroughly hybrid, visually and physically, rendering a world simultaneously organic and artificial, yet personal.
I turned left from Canal onto Broadway, checking out Deanna Evans Projects, where Catherine Haggarty’s show “Afterlife” is up. Haggarty simultaneously explores personal and family history and her own process in each painting, affixing all manner of painted and sometimes encrypted memorabilia to structures such as wooden skids. Her paintings are coded and rebus-like, and Johnsian in their use of faux woodgrain and tape and their references to American Precisionists via crosshatching, silhouettes, and maps. Haggarty’s skill at rendering luminosity and translucence is considerable, especially given that her works are as much drawn as they are painted, prioritizing a wandering line.
Next I visited Ofer Wolberger’s inaugural exhibition at Portal 5. (A personal note: I painted the floor of this gallery, some 30 years ago, when I was working for artist David Dupuis one summer. The building, once known as Magna Fabric, then housed dozens of artists’ studios. My first NYC studio, secured in 1988, was directly across the street.) Wolberger’s work is Hand-Painted Pop, as defined by the eponymous 1993 Whitney Museum exhibition. His use of smooth, flat, opaque monochrome on roughly surfaced burlap connects his work with Carl Ostendarp’s, but Wolberger is more graphic, often employing a tremulous black line – which in turn recalls the comic lyricism of pop eroticist John Wesley – to create an image full of positive and negative spatial reversals, not unlike the famous visual dualities of duck/rabbit or young lady/old lady.
Also included are a few vertical sculptures whose spectrum recalls Ellsworth Kelly’s work, and slenderness and elegance Blinky Palermo’s sculptures. Wolberger’s color coding is cleverly sourced from the strips attached to convenience store exits to measure the heights of fleeing thieves. Wolberger’s work is reversible, variable, and extremely well-crafted, susceptible to both quick and long reads.
I’ve mentioned Jasper Johns much more than I expected to in this run of short takes, but the old lion remains a touchstone for so much contemporary painting. Johns even bears some influence on the truly globalist work of Congolese-American Jimi Kabela, whose debut solo show is at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Chelsea. In addition to employing materially impacted numbers, he often incorporates colorful fabric scraps, street decal decorations, and foreign currency into his pieces. They constitute maps of a sort, perhaps journeys. If Johns iconically defined Americana in the 1950s with his widely reproduced flag paintings, Kabela might do the same for pan-Africanism with his impressively intoxicating blend of elements. Trafficking in global content in art is not exactly new, but Kabela’s authentic lingua franca, informed by an extraordinary personal journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Texas to New York, is certainly fresh and of this moment.
“Elysian Fields,” 490 Atlantic, 490 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. Through December 15, 2024. Artists: Jeffrey Bishop, Pamela Cardwell, and Cathy Diamond.
“Dream Archives,” Eleventh Hour Art, 61 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. Through December 24, 2024. Artists: Katelyn Alain, Kyung Kim, Mayowa Nwadike, Carter Shocket, and Xiangjie Rebecca Wu
“Embers,” Platform Project Space, 20 Jay Street, #319, Brooklyn, NY. Through December 14, 204. Artists: David Ambrose, Lauriston Avery, Nick Benfey, J.A. Feng, Dana Frankfort, Clare Grill, Jackie Saccoccio, and Michelle Segre.
“Jordan Homstad: All That Surrounds Is Black,” RainRain, 110 Lafayette Street, Suite 201, New York, NY. Through December 14, 2024.
“Catherine Haggarty: Afterlife,” Deanna Evans Projects, 373 Broadway, E15, New York, NY. Through November 23, 2024.
“Ofer Wolberger: Three’s Company,” Portal 5, 373 Broadway, E11, New York, NY. Through December 7, 2024.
“Jimi Kabela: Amalgamation,” Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 520 West 27th Street, New York, NY. Through December 7, 2024.
About the author: Michael Brennan is an abstract painter based in Brooklyn who writes on art.
Thank you for bringing these artists and galleries to my attention. Very much appreciated.