Dissolving Realms

About

Featuring—Tom Anholt, Leonora Carrington, Dominic Chambers, Sedrick Chisom, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Giovanelli, Jake Grewal, Lee Krasner, Nengi Omuku, Naudline Pierre, Howardena Pindell, Antonia Showering, TARWUK, and Flora Yukhnovich.

The paintings on view incorporate fantastical and cosmological themes to conjure realms that either flicker on the precipice of abstraction or dissolve completely into pure color and form. With an international eye, Dissolving Realms draws widely from both art historical and contemporary practices to reflect on the legacies and impact that 20th century artists—namely those associated with Abstract Expressionism, color field painting and Surrealism—have had on young painters of today.

The earliest works on view were realized in 1946 by British artist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988), whose interest in the natural world, esotericism, and the occult prompted her to develop a new mode of painting. Teetering between reality and imagination, biomorphic shapes and those typically associated with the female body, Coloquhoun’s paintings verge on the surreal. Her works also reflect the organic landscape of Cornwall, on the South West coast of Britain, where the artist was based. In dialogue with work made in 2021 and 2022, Colquhoun’s paintings spark correlations between representation vs abstraction in a postwar world and in painting today.

Leonor Fini represents the epitome of the ambiguity explored in the exhibition—figures in a dense fecund natural environment can also be read as emerging from abstract color play. Her work draws parallels between the representation of landscape’s natural formal ambiguity and the use of abstract plains of pigment in the lineage of color field painting. This element is further heightened by her work’s conversation with Helen Frankenthaler’s Wine Dark (1965) a luscious composition, executed in the artist’s soak-stain technique, comprising crimson and deep-brown organic forms and interspersed with brilliant whites and oranges.

Leonora Carrington’s Composition (Ur of the Chaldees) (1950) made shortly after the artist migrated from Europe to Mexico City, is a disquieting moonlit scene, with sphinxlike creatures that morph in and out of the desert landscape.

Landscape and water are driving forces in this exhibition: from Tom Anholt’s silent, isolated and moonlit waterfalls, Jake Grewal’s mythical figures set amidst trees or which bath in natural pools to Naudline Pierre’s hybridized bodies that sit between celestial or subaqueous worlds. Nengi Omuku draws on vegetal and cosmological landscape, whereas Flora Yukhnovich’s jewel-like studies look to outdoor parkland scenes popular in the 18th century (referencing, in rococo terms, the ‘fête galante’).

Feelings of otherworldliness dominate this exhibition and question the intrinsic ambiguity of certain forms in the natural world. The alchemy of night becoming day, or day becoming night, is skewed by Louise Giovanelli’s discolike painting, Orbiter (2022). Similarly, Antonia Showering blurs the boundaries between which bodies begin and end.

Writing with explosive energy, two paintings by Lee Krasner—Icarus and Chrysalis (both 1964)—feel purely analogous to the act of creation itself. Recalling the Big Bang, the compositions’ swooping gestures are reminiscent of comet tails, half-moon crescents, and celestial realms. With a love of the natural world, its colors and complex forms, Krasner often described her work as “organic”.

Howardena Pindell’s Space Frame #2, (1969) is a dispersed composition of grids and dashes in pastel tones across canvas. While drawing on a wide range of subject matter, from the personal and diaristic to the social and political, Pindell similarly looked to the recurring biomorphic forms of the natural world: “Circles are an iconic form: the sun, the moon, the Earth, the planets.” Pindell shares an atmospheric quality with Louise Giovanelli, a delicacy and luminosity, challenges the eye by dissolving representation into carefully crafted textures and patterns.

With its landscapes of paint and kaleidoscopic scenes made up of shards of glimmering color, this show aims to pinpoint a dialogue between mid-century artists and those working today.

Dissolving Realms is the first exhibition in the United States to be curated by British art historian, curator, and broadcaster Katy Hessel. Hessel runs the Instagram account and podcast The Great Women Artists, and is a Curatorial Trustee of Charleston, the former home of the Bloomsbury Group. She has written extensively on the subject of women artists for British Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and runs the annual The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti for emerging artists. She regularly presents arts documentaries for the BBC and her first book, The Story of Art without Men, will be published by Penguin in the UK September 2022 (US publisher to be announced soon).

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