Gallery Listings

ACA Galleries, New York City

“Voices of Dissonance: Blacklisted Artists and Others,” includes, in addition to political/psychological visual narratives by Jerome Witkins, work by Philip Evergood and the contemporary fantasist Irene Hardwicke Olivieri. October 16–November 29, 2008.

 

Atlanta Art Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia

“Jacob Collins and the Water Street Atelier,” sixty works by Collins and thirty-seven of his students and alumni, including Juliette Aristides, Carl Dobsky, Edward Minoff and Travis Schlaht. October 17–November 20, 2008.

 

Arden Gallery, Boston

Pacific Northwest shore scapes by Victoria Adams, combining old master naturalism and spiritual illumination. November, 2008.

 

Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York City

Luigi Benedicenti, “La Dolce Vita,” hypnotically glossy, uncanny, hyper-realist depictions of deserts by an Italian painter. November 6–December 6, 2008.

 

The unearthly beauty of Earth’s polar regions has long stirred the imaginations of explorers, writers and artists. Mary Shelley ended her 1818 novel Frankenstein with the doctor’s pursuit of the creature across Arctic wastes, and Edgar Allan Poe included Antarctica in his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Competitive exploration—a curious mix of scientific curiosity, nationalism and pure adventure—is captured in the extraordinary 1919 documentary film South, the record of Ernest Shackleton’s 1915 expedition, with breathtaking footage of his ship, the Endurance, being slowly crushed by ice. Werner Herzog’s brilliant recent documentary Encounters at the End of the World continues the tradition, bringing a new urgency to the saga, as this fragile ecosystem is threatened by global warming.
 

In Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), E.H. Gombrich considers the fundamental challenge of representational painting: how to translate a three-dimensional world into two dimensions. There are many ways of accomplishing this task. The flat figures of Egyptian wall painting and medieval manuscripts are as formally valid—and as culturally eloquent—as the more illusionistically rounded figures of Greco-Roman antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Gombrich, who titles the first section of his study “The Limits of Likeness,” explores the shifting conventions that govern both artists and audiences. The current revival of representational art is built, to some extent, on efforts to restore certain art historical conventions. But, as this fall’s crop of exhibitions suggests, the new realism is still very much a work-in-progress.