David Nolan New York
527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001
t: +1 212 925 6190
f: +1 212 334 9139
info@davidnolangallery.com
Goings on About Town: Art
by Andrea K. Scott
Animal, vegetable, or mineral? The answer’s all three in the wildly imagined, if mannered, new paintings of this mid-career American artist. Ross combines portrait, still-life, and landscape, with a nod to the composite sleight of hand of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, not to mention Mr. Potato Head: mountains stick out their tongues, land masses morph into bullfrogs, and earlike blobs occupy eye sockets. Terrestrial greens and celestial blues dominate Ross’s palette, punctuated by peaky yellows and raw-meat pink and reds (somewhere, Chaim Soutine and Philip Guston are smiling). For all their painterly know-how, there’s a refreshing idiosyncrasy to Ross’s sci-fi grotesqueries, in which strangers and strange lands become one. Through Dec. 6.
Art in Review
by Ken Johnson
Why do painters still paint? One reason is that it’s an efficient way to obsess over the insoluble mind-body problem. People have physical bodies and nonphysical consciousness, but no one knows exactly how they connect. Similarly, paintings are material objects and vehicles of immaterial imagination, and the relationship between those two aspects remains magnetically mysterious.
Full article
Hybrids, Mutants: Alexander Ross at David Nolan
by David Brody
The painting and drawing practices of Alexander Ross, always in fundamental opposition, have increasingly been cross-pollinating. The paintings create photorealist illusions, and are thus, to a high degree, preordained. They are mappings of a kind, in which, in Caroll Dunham’s appreciative phrase, Ross “systematizes rendering as a conflation of sonar and paint-by-numbers.” The images they map are purpose-made glossy digital photo-collages of Plasticine sculptures, built in turn upon ideas in the drawings. As for the drawings themselves, they are pure inventions.
Full article