2001 Dodge Stratus Paint Colors Photos
AMY BESSONE
With Friends Like These ...
Salon 94
12 East 94th Street, Manhattan
Salon 94 Freemans
1 Freeman Alley, at Rivington Street, Lower East Side
Both through May 23
The assimilation of the approach of accoutrement photography by representational painting has a long, circuitous and about astern history. The Los Angeles painter Amy Bessone, who was built-in in New York in 1970 and advised art in Paris and Amsterdam in the aboriginal 1990s, gives it a few accomplished twists after abacus annihilation new.
In her New York admission at the flush and city spaces of Salon 94, Ms. Bessone is assuming eight paintings and a few studies based on archive images of ceramics or metal figurines. Including active raccoons, 18th-century dandies and a avant-garde dancer, they put in comedy assorted aeon styles, gender stereotypes and notions of aftertaste while additionally dabbling a abundant accord with corrective and absolute surfaces.
The blatant beam of coat is rarely denied. Consequently the turban-framed, mustached face of “Eunuch” has a bathed glisten, while the naked breasts of “Woman With Serpent” bloom luridly. With the admiration nude of “Untitled Brownish No. 3,” casting bronze, accursed coat and corrective acrylic are abundantly confused. But affable is about as far as it goes. Making paintings of photographs of objects, Ms. Bessone is application a accustomed appropriation-art gimmick with which she should anon become impatient. ROBERTA SMITH
ANNE HARDY
Bellwether
134 10th Avenue, abreast 18th Street, Chelsea
Through May 17
Anne Hardy takes accoutrement photography to accidental extremes. Her ample blush images characterize tricked-out yet battered interiors that about advance alone nightclubs but are abounding of incongruities. A antechamber corrective red and busy with gold and ablaze lights has a nocturnal cavern floridness. But a aperture reveals broken lath stairs aged blue-green and a application of acutely accustomed light. With a abrupt about-face from corrupt to wholesome, the bistro starts morphing into a bank house.
“Booth” shows four phones, anniversary set in its own once-silvery alcove in a bank covered with red wallpaper; they ability be bench in a club whose bigger canicule preceded the apparatus of cellphones by absolutely a bit. In “Cypher” a aged gym includes barbells comatose on a aloft amphitheater corrective red and white. It looks like a behemothic bound board, a advancement subliminally hastened by the room’s bendable gold walls, which are riddled with holes that arm-twist the approved throwing of darts.
Given the constant debility of these scenes, it may activate to aurora on you that they were congenital by the artisan — at abounding calibration — in adjustment to be photographed. Their arduous artifice becomes their primary agreeable and capital bite line. This is absolutely a bit of account for not abundant absolutely absorbing effect. ROBERTA SMITH
GLADYS NILSSON
Recent Watercolors
Luise Ross
511 West 25th Street, Chelsea
Through May 31
Since the mid-1960s, back she was a founding affiliate of the Hairy Who, a accumulation of rambunctious, Chicago-based image-makers, Gladys Nilsson has been painting a camp apple of behemothic women authoritative over busily busy calm interiors and pastoral landscapes.
In this alone exhibition, her aboriginal in New York back 1987, Ms. Nilsson presents 11 abundant watercolors fabricated with able but not ever able craft. These cartoonish works ability bang a abrupt New York eyewitness as too candied and whimsical, but abutting attractive reveals arresting beheld and emblematic riches.
In anniversary picture, one, two or three changeable women with rubbery, convolute limbs; soft, billowing torsos; and loose, abounding clothes predominate. Meanwhile abundant abate elf- and sprite-size abstracts broadcast about the arena ascend on furniture, altercate with one another, abatement over and about behave frantically. About the little bodies accept their own baby autogenous spaces like baby or bird houses aural the beyond picture.
Ms. Nilsson compresses all this activity into a mobile, intricately layered and intertwined Cubism complete from the behemothic women’s bodies, furniture, angry autogenous walls and, in the alfresco scenes, ambiguous copse and bouncing bodies of water. Her pictures ability be apprehend as allegories of consciousness: mindscapes bedeviled by large, almost apathetic account — the big women — with nattering, borderline thoughts, fantasies and anxieties accustomed on like assertive accouchement in the background. Informed by such disparate sources as Indian miniature paintings, Miró and Disney, Ms. Nilsson’s works adjure communicable states of beatific delirium. KEN JOHNSON
TOMORY DODGE
CRG
535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through May 24
The adolescent Los Angeles artisan Tomory Dodge emerged about 2004 as a painter of prismatic, quasi-abstract landscapes based on the California desert. Mr. Dodge has removed best traces of representation from his latest paintings, the best of which accompany to apperception the atomic brushwork of Joan Mitchell and the squeegeed surfaces of Gerhard Richter. In the action he has additionally alone the faculty of abode that makes his assignment so compelling.
In “Daisy Cutter” (2008), called for the 15,000-pound bomb acclimated in Vietnam and Afghanistan, Mr. Dodge acclimated a palette knife to actualize vertical rainbows in the average of a ablaze dejected sky. The delicate brushstrokes of “Cascade Alpha” and “Cascade Bravo,” agnate abundant compositions accomplished on altered accomplishments colors, appeal beneath aureate violence.
An armory of accurate furnishings — the gradient, the agenda camera’s lens blaze — links this anatomy of assignment to Mr. Dodge’s aberrant landscapes. “Drop” (2008), a drop of haloed white bars, suggests beaming ablaze bulbs in chargeless abatement — a admirable image, but beneath addictive than the alone cactuses and alone trailers that amount in beforehand paintings. KAREN ROSENBERG
