Carolyn Carr
March 8 - April 5, 2008
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Spanierman Gallery Exhibits Abstract Artist Carolyn Carr
By Joan Baum
"Sunbather's Diary" by Carolyn Carr, 2007, mixed media, 59 x 143 inches. |
While Spanierman Gallery at East Hampton on Newtown Lane readies itself for spring, the elegant Spanierman Gallery on 58th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, continues to expand upon its more than half-century mission to exhibit 19th and 20th century American art by featuring contemporary artists in its adjoining “white box” exhibition space, Spanierman Modern. This broadened mission strengthens the connection between Spanierman Modern, in business since June 2006, and Spanierman at East Hampton, where abstract painters and sculptors rule.
You can, of course, still see the burnished American Masters in the city – a rich trove of them, including gorgeous Chases, Coles, Hassams, Homers, and Levers, but the current white box exhibition, 15 paintings by the talented 41-year old Carolyn Carr, persuasively demonstrates Spanierman’s commitment to the 21st century and to new art that addresses traditional values of harmony and composition. Carr’s a good fit for the midtown gallery because her subtly hued, large-format paintings are in keeping with Spanierman’s overall preference for tonal art. Her Stags leap, positioned attractively in one of the gallery’s prominent windows - an eye-catching design of interlocking linear shapes in minimalist colors aptly signals what viewers can expect from the works inside.
"August" by Carolyn Carr, 2007, mixed media, 61 1/2 x 37 1/4 inches. |
The Carr’s may prove particularly welcome in light of the just-opened 2008 Whitney Museum Biennial which, while not as wild and perverse as previous exhibitions, still features the kind of large-scale installations and performance pieces that have come to define much of what is considered current or avant garde. With Carr, the viewer gets art the old-fashioned way - on the walls and tastefully arranged to encourage appreciation of variations on subject matter and style. Carr favors line loops of muted pinks and grays, sometimes black, on treated beige linen or paper. The restricted palette and interwoven forms create a sense both soothing and dramatic. The lines are sharply defined, and while uniform in color from a distance, reveal up close smooth over-painting that gives off a muted luminosity. How do the lines not bleed onto the linen? A passerby surmises that the loops are not painted but applied (not so). Carr smiles. She’s not going to give away trade secrets.
Atlanta born and bred, Carolyn Carr studied at The Atlanta College of Art, first as a photographer, then as a figurative artist and in the last few years, concentrating on abstraction. She kept “peeling away” at forms, she says, wanting to get beyond the sense that representational figures caused viewers to concentrate on the person depicted rather than on conception, medium or technique. Although she had been regularly exhibiting before going abstract, she took time off to evolve into the new direction, she says. She became particularly interested in linking her long family history in old Atlanta - its culture, literature, art and ‘resonances of the Civil War past’ with “those of a vibrant place at the forefront of social change in America.”
Of course, such a statement may invite viewers to read into her black and white loops all manner of symbolism, but such projection is not necessary to enjoy her work. If the paintings do not obviously evince her “documentary approach, using skeins of line and movement to record moments of time and space,” they do prove satisfying as designs. Carr likens her method of carving space with line to “carving out a melon so that negative space is [also] given shape.” The unusual but pleasing results are seen particularly in the six acrylics on paper displayed in the white box front room, each design basically similar to the next, but executed in different color combinations. Grays on one canvas can thus seem like blue grays on another, and so with the pinks and whites; even the beige backgrounds acquire deeper or lighter tones, in response to a juxtaposed hue.
In Spanierman Modern’s extended second room the Carr’s are more various in size and execution. The huge 60” x 144” “Sunbathers’ Diary,” natural pigments and latex on linen, catches the eye with its complex, double-panel swirls, but it is the smaller “Wonderlust.” with its pink and gray loops that run out to the edge that truly impresses as composition. Carr cannot strategically position her swirls to allow for lots of head and foot room, though she seems to in “Crime of Ornament,” where a curved sweep of black is eccentrically cut off, or “Sovereignty” where a major line curves up, then down, as a single gestural stroke.
For sure, some of the titles are oblique, as in the acrylic on paper “The Mystery of Manners,” homage to a 1969 prose collection by the great American fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor. If Carr has found inspiration in this literary master of the Southern Gothic, all the more wonder that it has prompted her to create abstracts of noticeable calm.
- The exhibit runs through April 5. Spanierman Modern is at 53 East 58th Street, New York.
Joan Baum lives in Springs and covers literature and the arts for print and radio.
This article can also be viewed on the Hamptons.com website:
http://www.hamptons.com/detail.ihtml?id=3200
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