Boston Galleries First Friday
SOWA Celebrates December Openings
By: Charles Giuliano - Dec 04, 2006
There was a busy round of opening this past Friday night when we toured SOWA the cluster of galleries in Boston's South End. The evening started by contemplating the single work by Vincent Szarek in the window devoted to gallerist Mario Diacono in the bookstore Art Libri. It is a roundish, brightly flavored bluish work in relief. We learned that "Amorphous and Fumed" is "...both a three-dimensional abstract/baroque painting and a star shaped board for surfing the skies." Ok.
There was a group show of small works at Boston Sculptors. We admired the "Finger Sculptures" of the always interesting Laura Baring Gould and chatted with Peter Lipsitt about his show coming up in February with plans to get together in the studio.
As usual Gallery Kayafas has mounted a museum level historical survey "Pictures Outside the Box" with works by Paul Bloomfield, Harold Edgerton, Thomas Gustainis, Judith McMillan, Georgy Kepes, Abelardo Morell, Dan Ranalli, Tory Nakanishi, Jo Sandman, Maggie Stark, Christian Shad, Susan Derges, Donna Hamil Tamlin and Laura Wulf. It surveyed aspects of photograms. It is the kind of show you want to come back to an experience slowly and in depth.
Nexct door at Samson Projects is new work by Jeffrey Gibson which updates what we reported on in the the Aldrich Museum exhibition "No Reservations" which combined Native and Non Native artists dealing with that cultural legacy. The artists has been working on relief sculpture and paintings and occasionally combining them in multi media works. Here the focus is mostly on painting with some relief elements. The greatest change is that he is now working entirely abstractly with ribbons of color and squiggley forms that evoke the influence of the artist Albert Oehlen. In earlier work he was using figurative and narrative elements with bright surreal colors. But he relates that he is in the process of putting a lot of self inflicted burden behind and freeing himself to just explore and paint. Just to see where the work takes him. It will be interesting to follow just where he goes from here.
The Bernard Toale gallery has a tandem of provocative shows. David Hilliard, who does photo panoramas combining several independent views and separate photographs. has enjoyed significant success sunce showing with Toale for the past several years with museum shows and impressive catalogue. This show has a strong gay sensibitilty for example a nude man cut off below the waist by an ironing board while a nude lover hovers in the space to the left. It evokes both domesticity and eroticism.
A second body of work at Toale by Joe Fig focuses on meticulously crafted, insightful dioramas of the studios of famous contemporary artists. We see Matthew Ritchie at work in his space. There are also smaller pieces that range from messy to neat painter's studios. These are delicious and absorbing works.
At Kingston Gallery there was a strong show of expressive figurative paintings by Judy Brown. There was also a lively group show at Michael Price Gallery but when I tried to look up information on the net I just hit a blank wall. It pays to advertise.