Dr. Anita Bates’s exhibition, A Long Time Coming, now on view at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Arts revives a fresh experience to Abstract Expressionism.

Installation, Anita Bates, N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art 2023. All images courtesy of DAR.

Detroit artist Anita Bates opened her exhibition, A Long Time Coming, at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art on September 9, 2023, with recent abstraction expressionistic paintings rich in color, scale, line, texture, and composition. The paintings are like forest flowers, reminding this writer of music performed so exquisitely in the 1960s by the jazz musician Charles Lloyd. Gestural strokes, mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity characterize the work.  Her creative process over the past thirty years follows in the footsteps of Willem de Kooning (and others), but she focuses on the color field, devoid of any reference to the landscape or figure.

Abstract Expressionism emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a diverse body of work that introduced new directions in painting—and shifted the art world’s focus forever. In distinction to the emotional energy and gestural surface marks of abstract expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning, the Color Field painters initially appeared to be cool and austere, effacing the individual mark in favor of large, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to be the essential nature of visual abstraction, along with the actual shape of the canvas. However, Color Field painting has proven to be sensual and deeply expressive, albeit different from gestural abstract expressionism.

Bates says in her statement, “The colors found in the majority of the work in this exhibition are lighter than previous bodies of work; they are colors associated with my childhood but seen through the eyes of maturity.  I primarily work in the triadic combinations of green, orange, and purple or a palette of red together and always gravitate towards these hues while consistently pushing my knowledge of these harmonies via desaturation and contrast. For me, this element of art and design demonstrates my growth as an artist; The ability to make color transition with tints, tones and shades.”

Anita Bates, The Power of Subtlety, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2023

The two diptych canvases,  30 X 46” each, and entitled The Power of Subtlety, are connected with a black horizontal line in the top quarter, providing the geometric compositional structure for the overall painting. The background throughout is a sloshing around of pastel colors from her triad of green, orange, and purple, where transparent blends of white and tan merge. Possibly influenced by artist Lee Krasner, Bates plants herself in color field composition with oddly shaped abstract elements. The dominant feeling is esoteric, with a personalized set of small, mysterious objects that keep the viewer at bay.  The artist seems to be saying that the painting does not need to convey a meaning other than the way it makes the viewer feel.

For Abstract Expressionists, the authenticity or value of a work lies in its directness and immediacy of expression. A painting is meant to be a reveal of the artist’s identity. The gesture, the artist’s “signature,” is evidence of the actual process of the work’s creation.

Anita Bates.The Zoo, 60X96″, Mixed Media on Canvas, 2023

The Zoo,  another 30 X46” diptych, is more lively, with a much larger color palette that includes details of black drawing and a more integrated overlapping of shapes.  Is it a Zoo?  If so, it is one not so much of animals but of contrasting shapes from the artist’s subconscious reflecting her sensibility. There is a lot more compositional traffic in The Zoo that speaks to the language of her attraction to the overlapping and action-packed gesture of Abstract Expressionism.

Anita Bates, Poivres Rouge, 60×72″, Mixed Media on canvas,

Poivres Rouge is a mixed-media painting on canvas that divides the space into quarters and places its weight in the center of this organic composition. The title refers to a French restaurant or, in the dictionary, defined as Pepper, perhaps based on the artist’s travels in France.

Early art critics, like Harold Rosenberg, had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena which to come to terms with the act of creation. To Clement Greenberg, the physicality of the paintings’ clotted, dripping, and oil-caked surfaces was the key to understanding these works as documents of the artists’ existential struggle. Bates seems to occupy a middle ground since her paintings are non-referential yet emotive.

Anita Bates, Candy, 60×96″, Mixed Media, 2023

Staying with a familiar palette of color in Candy, Bates presents layers of oil paint working from dark to light with a multitude of overlapping shapes, lines, and drips as she balances the congestion of abstraction. Brush strokes move horizontally and vertically, and a balanced of black drawing helps hold the picture together.  There is a distinct push and pull of paint, solvents, and water, mixing to create diverse textures.

Like the Charles Lloyd album from 1966, Forest Flower, the uplifting abstractions in A Long Time Coming draw the viewer back… and then back again for more observation and discovery.

Dr. Anita Bates earned her Ph.D. in Education and an M.F.A. in painting from Wayne State University. She was a 2019 Kresge Arts Fellow, resides as a native of Highland Park, Michigan, and has widely exhibited throughout Metro Detroit and beyond. https://www.anitabatestheartist.com/

Lucy Slivinski @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

The Improvisation of Matter Into Magic

Installation Lucy Slivinski sculpture N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

Critically acclaimed artist Lucy Slivinski hails from Chicago, Illinois, bringing her wide collection of sculptures and installations. For over 40 years, as one of the few female artists working in metal, Slivinski has created abstract sculptures for interior and exterior residential and commercial spaces.  Most of her contemporary sculpture features found objects, scrap metal, and other locally sourced, recycled products that would otherwise end up in a landfill or smelting factory, continuing to harm the environment.  As an abstract artist, Slivinski’s unique style has been commissioned for many large outdoor public sculptures, live performances, and gallery installations.

Lucy Slivinski earned an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a B.F.A. from Northern Illinois University.

Herbert Gentry @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

Installation Herbert Gentry N’Namdi Center for the Arts 2023

Herbert Gentry’s paintings juxtapose faces and masks, shifting orientations of figures and heads—human and animal—into profiles to the left, to the right, above, and below. The direction of the head, as face or profile, leading right or left, or facing front, is played against the relative scale of each head, its position on the canvas, and its relationship to the others.  The faces evoke subtle expressions and moods. Rather than using images to depict a concrete story, Gentry releases his experiences upon the canvas. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Mr. Gentry was raised in Harlem during the highly creative Harlem Renaissance period. He served as a member of the Armed Forces in World War II, and his early commitment to art was confirmed upon his return to Paris in 1946, where he studied painting.

Three Gallery Exhibitions, September 9 – through November 30, 2023

Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction at the David Klein Gallery, Detroit.

An installation shot from the opening of Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit, up through July 22.  All images courtesy of David Klein Gallery

The abstract revolution that rocked New York City and the art world in the late 40s and 50s was, famously, a mostly male affair — in the popular narrative, at least, a testosterone-fueled explosion of masculine energy and creativity.

Except, of course, there were women working in abstraction and producing epic work at the same time, like Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson or Helen Frankenthaler. They just didn’t get the headlines, a phenomenon Mary Gabriel explores at length in her 2018 book, “Ninth Street Women.”

Rebutting the notion that abstraction and machismo are connected at the hip, the David Klein Gallery in Detroit is hosting Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction, which will be up through July 22. The Klein show spotlights four artists – Elise Ansel, Caroline Del Giudice, Alisa Henriquez and Rosalind Tallmadge. (The title, Together and Apart, comes from a Virginia Woolf short story from 1925 that explored artistic affinity among several women friends.)

“In the history of American art,” said gallery director Christine Schefman, “the New York school is where abstraction happened, with all those macho guys – DeKooning, Pollack, and so on.   There were women there, and some of them became quite successful,” she added, “but they were definitely secondary to the men. The men were the geniuses.”

The women on display at David Klein pursue very different paths, from painting-and-collage to welded steel geometric forms, to name two. Drawing from different genres was, of course, part of the fun of pulling the show together, but Schefman says the women work well in unison, with their differing visions bumping up against one another. “They all have,” Schefman said, stopping for a second to pick the right phrase, “a feminine take. When you see their work together, there’s a certain harmony.”

Rosalind Tallmadge, Oberon, Mica, glass beads, sumi ink, Caplain gold leaf and sequin fabric on panel, 60-inch diameter, 2023.

Brooklyn artist Rosalind Tallmadge works with the most-exotic materials in the show, including mica, glass beads, Caplain gold leaf and sequin fabric. The majority of these works-on-panel are round, giving the distinct impression of alien worlds seen from outer space — deeply fissured and cratered landscapes with a dull metallic glint, both otherworldly and surprising.

A 2015 graduate of Cranbrook, Tallmadge was featured in that institution’s 2021 retrospective, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn. She was the subject of a solo show, Terrain, at David Klein in 2021.

Elise Ansel, Obsidian Butterfly II, Oil on linen, 50 x 44 inches, 2022.

 As an undergrad at Brown University, Elise Ansel fell back in love with Old Master paintings of the sort she’d seen as a child at the Frick Collection in New York City, and their drama and grandeur inspired her contemporary abstract oil-on-linen canvases – albeit reinterpreted and stripped of all figurative and narrative elements.

All the same, these canvases pack much the same emotional and visual drama, which Ansel, who got her MFA at Southern Methodist University, pumps up with deft use of color, and gestural forms that often appear to be in motion.

In editing out stories from great masterpieces, Ansel universalizes the pieces, broadening their possible meanings. She also, perhaps, feminizes the great masterpieces of yore, at once creating images both subtle and evocative – with not a Great Man in sight.

“I realized that these exquisite paintings were presented from the male point of view—as if that was the only one that mattered,” Ansel told Boston Magazine in 2022. With force and delicacy, the Maine-based artist succeeds in subverting the art-historical male gaze.

Caroline Del Giudice, Twirl III, Powder-coated steel, 24 x 29 x 25 inches, 2023.

 Caroline Del Giudice, another Cranbrook grad, is a Detroit-based artist with a metalworking studio in Redford where she crafts a range of welded-steel sculptures. The three brightly colored distorted arches that greet you as you enter read as massive, heavy objects – even though they’re actually only two feet tall and just a bit wider.

Each sports a great colored, slightly reflective surface  – crimson, purple and yellow, respectively – that’s kind of magnetic, looking very much like some industrial product of the highest order. And while their shapes describe a rounded arch of sorts, the geometry has been stretched, as it were, with one leg of the broken circle a step behind the other.

This contradicts your first assumption that these must be circular forms, at the same time that the staggered legs invest the structures with much greater visual stability. You could knock over a regular arch. Not these constructs. They stand their ground.

Alisa Henriquez, Sweet Nothings (detail), Acrylic, oil, digital prints, fabric and glitter on canvas, 63 x 53 inches, 2023.

Alisa Henriquez, who teaches at Michigan State University and got her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, in some ways gives us the most obviously feminine works in the whole show. At least, that’s the case with Sweet Nothings, in which a woman’s eye and fingers with painted nails play starring roles in this absorbing collage. The eye, in particular, is hard to avoid – just off-center and nicely done up in mascara, it stares out at the viewer with a questioning gaze that feels just a little sad.

In all six of her painted collages, Henriquez mixes colors with abandon, sketching out geometric objects and oddball shapes that often overlap or bleed into one another. These are crowded, active works – each quadrant, cut from the rest, could be a freestanding painting. In that sense there’s no real center, more of an intriguingly disordered visual universe.

Elise Ansel, Rosy Fingered Dawn, Oil on linen, 44 x 50 inches, 2022.

Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction will be at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery through July 22.

An installation view of Rick Vian: The Growth Habit at Ferndale’s M Contemporary through Feb. 18.   Image courtesy of DAR

Over a long career, Rick Vian has alternated between two seemingly contradictory subjects for paintings. The first were breathtakingly realistic portraits of Upper Peninsula tree canopies and the sky beyond, later abstracted and given sharper colors in his Yellow Knife series in the late ‘teens. The second set of subjects, however, involve aggressive abstracts that call to mind both industrial processes and the power of elemental forms.

The engaging show at Ferndale’s M Contemporary, Rick Vian: The Growth Habit, falls entirely into the latter abstract basket, even as its title refers to trees and the shape and form each species will ultimately take. The growth habit suggests a certain inevitability – when unimpeded, the oak is destined to achieve a certain height, width and outline, characteristics that set it apart from all others. So too, apparently, with the paintings in this show.

The Growth Habit will be up through Feb. 18, when there will be a closing reception and an Artist’s Talk from 4-6 p.m.

When you boil it down, the dozen or so polyurethane-and-oil paintings hung here – which bear a glancing resemblance to the Russian Constructivists and Fernand Léger’s 1920s “mechanical period” – all come out of roughly the same mold. They’re action-packed, geometric abstracts. On occasion they’ve got an Escher-like quality, with three-dimensional shapes going places they simply can’t, while at other points, the geometry morphs into something more sculptural and biological in form. It’s a dualism that sets up an tense, interesting balance.

Rick Vian, Chickens in Bondage, II; Polyurethane and oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches, 2021. Images courtesy of MContemporary Gallery.

There’s a dualism as well in Vian’s use of color. Works here alternate between a warm palette full of strong orange, black and vermilion, and a chillier one heavy on grays, whites, black, and occasional sharp-red details. Chickens in Bondage, II, once you get past the tongue-in-cheek title, is an absorbing color essay in tones of deep orange and red, all edged in black. As ever with Vian’s maze-like works, there’s a confusion of forms: Is that an individual on hands and knees somewhere near the surface, or the tail end of a chicken? And what’s going on with the big gear teeth over to the right? Bondage has more of a machine-like quality than most of the other paintings on hand, and the vibe isn’t entirely happy, either – not surprising, perhaps, given the realities of commercial poultry production.

Rick Vian, Tell ‘Em Earl Lied; Polyurethane and oil, 72 x 60 inches, 2022.

M Contemporary owner and director Melannie Chard has had her eye on Vian for years and has always been a big fan. “Rick’s work is very energetic,” she said. “It’s got kind of a masculine feel to me — geometric but still organic, with that kind of play, that tension there that I find really interesting.” Indeed, both the mechanical and the organic fight for mastery on Vian’s canvases. This push-and-pull suffuses Tell ‘Em Earl Lied which, like most of Vian’s abstracts, seems to work simultaneously on several depth levels. There’s what’s going on at the surface, and then what’s partly obscured below, and then beneath that.

Rick Vian, Sex Machine; Polyurethane and oil on canvas, 15 x 13 inches, 2022. Image courtesy of DAR

Sitting on its own neat stack of cement blocks mid-gallery, is a much-smaller box painting, Sex Machine, one of several where the canvas wraps around all exposed surfaces. Thematically, there’s sort of a clamp-thing going on here. Three very similar “mechanical” devices — all of which look like they want to lock onto something, hard – march from stage left to stage right, setting up crosscurrents that pull much of the rest of the work with them, including what could fairly be described as a pair of abstracted Mickey Mouse ears.

Rick Vian, Horseshoes and Socks; Polyurethane and oil on canvas, 24 x 19 inches, 2022.

Vian, who did his undergraduate at Detroit’s School of the Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies) and got his MFA at Wayne State, stands out among fine artists by having time spent in his past as a commercial and industrial painter. “That’s where some of his palette comes from — like ‘Safety Yellow’ and ‘Safety Red,’” Chard said, referring to stock industrial paint colors.

This series, she says, actually got its start way back in the early 1970s, but was put down for decades while the artist went in other directions. He picked it back up over the past couple of years.

Vian’s technique, Chard said, is “really intuitive. He doesn’t really know what he’s going to do when he starts. And I think that speaks to his other life as a jazz drummer.” Indeed, in a nice touch other artists might want to emulate — to blow off steam, if nothing else — Vian keeps a set of drums right at hand in his studio.

Finally, we’ll close with the one canvas that seemed, without question, to have some mordant humor flickering around its edges, Like Trying to Explain Wagner to a Dead Horse. It’s another of the chilly-palette paintings, with a lot of over-scribbling that gives it the look of a vigorous work in progress. But there’s no denying there’s something like a slumped body in the foreground, and, poking up into the air, a couple feet. It’s hard to shake the conviction they belong to the aforementioned dead beast.

Rick Vian, Like Trying to Explain Wagner to a Dead Horse; Polyurethane and oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches, 2021.

Rick Vian’s exhibition The Growth Habit will be on exhibition at M Contemporary Gallery through February 18, 2023