The latest exhibition at Pentimenti Gallery doesn’t have a comprehensive title to cover the trio of featured artists, even though the work of the three is linked on a sociopolitical, if not purely artistic, level. But no matter, as you can see for yourself on First Friday.
“Drawn to Scale” features tiny landscapes by Nancy Agati. Here, scale is of paramount importance as the work is just larger than three or four postage stamps that form a square. Beyond the immediacy of the work itself, Agati tackles the “Big Sky” of many a red state for our East Coast (and true blue) consumption.
Lisa Dahl offers up mixed media work that combines painting and embroidery in “Home Sweet Home.” Her modus operandi is homespun, though just a bit too tight, as she paints suburban houses and then stitches in homey axioms. Besides resembling old-style samplers, the work is tongue in cheek to upend the normalcy of those values that put Bush over the top.
“Indication” finds William Steiger returning to the farmhouses that have been a stalwart feature of his work but he also adds schemata of amusement park rides that never were. What these rides offer is a sudden frisson that sticks in one’s memory and that paces the isolated buildings of the other work in their “red state” loneliness.
This is a most telling show that spans motifs and mediums.
Pentimenti Gallery, 145 N. Second St., 215.625.9990, www.pentimenti.com
Larry Becker Contemporary Art offers a time-spanning group show with “[Some] Drawings [Now and Then],” for its First Friday opening featuring Eve Aschheim, Marcia Hafif, Kocot and Hatton, Robin Miller, Quentin Morris and (yes, you read right!) Robert Ryman. The folks included are primarily known as painters, and yet marks are as important to their respective oeuvres as brushstrokes. The difference between the two are manifest and sublime, while the concept of time is evident in that work created in the past stands alongside more recent art.
Drawing is the most primal of art making, and there is nothing more tangible than a child holding a poised pencil. Unlike a paintbrush, no finesse is necessary, and drawing is the medium that sets many a child artist onto their life’s path. The question, however, is if the drawing is of something found in the real world or of the mind. In the case of the present show, it is work grounded in the latter realm.
The abstract impulse is the glue that binds the work of everyone here together, but there is something else, too, and that is how over time, when one is away from drawing, it is something that is a natural return. This is not analog of riding a bike after years of not doing so, but rather the fact that creativity cannot be pigeonholed.
Larry Becker Contemporary Art, 43 North Second St., 215.925.5389, www.artnet.com/becker.html
AroundPhilly Staff
