Robert Moskowitz, an artist often said to be a link between the New York School of the 1950s and “New Image” painting of the 1970s, appeared in several group shows in Chicago in decades past and now is having his first solo exhibition here–at the Alan Koppel Gallery–which is a cause for celebration.
There are only six pieces, all from the ’80s and ’90s, but the pastels are as large and ambitious as the paintings, and everything is representative of the quirky, reductive style that is entirely Moskowitz’s own.
Each piece has a large representational motif presented as a silhouette that has been cannily situated within the canvas or sheet and cropped for maximum tension. The motifs are not at all exotic–skyscrapers, smokestacks, a windmill, chain links, a bowling ball and pins. But the way the artist treats them gives an emotional charge out of all proportion to their everyday character.
Placement and cropping of the motifs pushes them to the edge of abstraction, and it’s important they stay on that edge, benefiting from the precariousness of being caught in an “in-between” state. The works then surround their motifs with all sorts of evidence of the artist’s hand, smudges and fingerprints in the pastels, thin and fluid brushwork in the paintings.
Moskowitz’s eye for color is particularly keen in the windmill picture on view. However, the impact of the works is equally strong when they are black and white or even black and dark gray, for the artist is unusually successful at evoking more than the works actually depict.
Koppel tugs at heartstrings by including pieces that seem to refer directly to the towers of the World Trade Center. But in any case, the works are more concerned with the past history of art than of a particular urban landscape, and they reverberate the way they do because of how they call up a whole lot of abstractions and near abstractions, from Charles Sheeler and Georgia O’Keeffe to Clyfford Still and Ellsworth Kelly.
The dialogue with past art continues as each piece establishes its presence firmly in the present. The combination is particularly heady because it takes over almost before you know it.
At 210 W. Chicago Ave., through March 30. 312-640-0730.
Jiwon Son
Jiwon Son is a Korean-American artist in her mid-30s who has practiced medical illustration as well as Japanese flower arranging. She feels they both have characteristics of the paintings she shows at the Byron Roche gallery: serenity, order, structure, control, contemplation and routine.
Son is particularly interested in Chinese, Korean and Japanese ink paintings from the 15th through the 18th Centuries. In fact, one painting by Mu Chi, “Six Persimmons,” generated a number of Son’s works on view.
Son, like the earlier artist, sought to capture and represent the fugitive aspects of nature in her peonies series. Then she transformed persimmons into apples for a picture that is concerned with the relationship between painting and meditation.
The Asian paintings she admires are often presented framed on all sides with panels of silk brocade. That also led Son to the painstaking practice of making brocade patterns the substance of a group of works she calls “Aggregates.”
These are fool-the-eye paintings in which Son meticulously reproduces elaborate, slightly raised motifs of fabrics. They are also the works in which the six characteristics she cited from past pursuits–running from serenity to routine–are most clearly present.
Added to the tight, repetitive patterns that fill each canvas edge to edge are gradations of tone that proceed vertically, giving a pronounced optical effect that may initially seem just a consequence of light that falls on each piece rather than a variation of color within it.
It’s to the artist’s credit that all of this registers on a viewer more positively than mere obsessiveness or, for that matter, seduction stemming from the appearance of luxurious materials. Son actually achieves a kind of spareness-within-luxuriance that conveys something of the positive meditational base of the work.
That said, there isn’t much variety in the “Aggregates” series, and the show is decidedly enlivened by the inclusion of Son’s earlier representational pieces, which cause welcome breaks in the calm that otherwise predominates.
At 750 N. Franklin St., through March 5. 312-654-0144.
