Cathy Lebowitz. Dark Skies, Rocks

About

In these new works executed in gouache on paper, pictorial structures begin to take on a life of their own. A vocabulary of spaces—horizons, mountains, rocks, streams, caves, huts, portals—roil through a skewed space that recalls Munch or Soutine, and at times Marsden Hartley. The works’ relation to landscape is best articulated by an excerpt from a letter written by Joan Mitchell in 1958: “I am very much influenced by nature as you define it . . . I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me and remembered feelings of them, which of course becomes transformed.”

Repetition of a high horizon line and dark skies brings the works in the exhibition into concert. Each piece functions as an individual composition, but they can also be seen as moments in an ongoing scape. Within the vocabulary of spaces, oddities present themselves. For one, the horizon is overactive showing increased activity rather than fading to a blur. Another strangeness is the accessibility of areas that are normally obscured, like the space inside a cave. One group of works that uses a palette of rich greens, umbers and grays takes as its subject a fantastical view into the inner life of boulders. Fluid, juicy brushstrokes define liminal spaces that transition between inside and outside, reality and abstraction. In other works, brushstrokes are distinct and many, like a Cambrian explosion of forms. The scene is more elaborate if equally transitional. The view is steep and deep, suffused by a preternatural light, where darkness above the horizon gives way to illuminated terrain below.

Lebowitz’s first exhibition at the gallery in 2021 was chosen as one of the best shows of the year by Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Smith wrote, “They are modest, completely riveting and highly unstable. Their surfaces are filled with interlocking shapes and textures that reflect the influence of Gorky and, oddly, Morandi. They refuse to coalesce into legibility, continually hinting at different possibilities.” Embracing the impossibility of stasis, the inevitability of time’s continuous movement, the works accept change as an imperative of existence. They occupy a state of becoming that suggests their own unbecoming. Action and reaction are suspended in the finite system of the frame.