Peter Frank

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Reflected Glories

Peter Frank
For some reason, there has been a spate of local exhibitions documenting in photographs the New York art and culture and social scene of the past several decades, from Amy Arbus’ street shots to the paparazzi of punk. Now comes the daddy of them all, Fred McDarrah, who from the......
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Words, and Worlds, Gone Mad

Peter Frank
Alexandra Grant’s paintings — and to a lesser extent works on paper — seem to be cityscapes of a kind, but there are relatively few buildings or other urban indicators in these pileup pictures. Rather, Grant’s contemporary Babylons are built out of babble, myriad words encased in bubbles all jammed......
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Still Waters and Restless Currents

Peter Frank
Of the work on the walls at Craig Krull Gallery, only Peter Alexander’s watercolors depict nature as such, but the natural world suffuses Sam Erenberg’s and Robin Mitchell’s paintings as well. Mitchell’s are on paper, hardly bigger than Alexander’s page-size studies of desert growths, and are densely striated almost to......
Marion Lane

Playtime

Peter Frank
For most of his bad-boy career, Chris Burden has emphasized the “boy” over the “bad.” Indeed, as you’d infer from its title, there’s something “good,” or at least centered and spiritual, about Yin Yang, Burden’s display of two items (plus photo editions) from his collection of vehicles. One of the......
Marion Lane

Playtime

Peter Frank
For most of his bad-boy career, Chris Burden has emphasized the “boy” over the “bad.” Indeed, as you’d infer from its title, there’s something “good,” or at least centered and spiritual, about Yin Yang, Burden’s display of two items (plus photo editions) from his collection of vehicles. One of the......
Greg Colson

Points of View

Peter Frank
Liza Ryan’s vision is a peripheral one. That is, what she seeks to convey in her photographs is imagery seen glancingly, distractedly — not looked at, but seen in the process of doing or thinking about something else. This gives a tremendously resonant poignancy to these otherwise attractive but mysteriously......
Ke Francis

Ke Francis and Andrew Saftel at Lowe Gallery

Peter Frank
The South has risen again. For years its artists — painters, sculptors and performers alike — have stewed together expressionism, surrealism, naturalism and conceptualism (with goodly doses of photography and pattern painting thrown in), mixing a heady concoction that mirrors and transmogrifies Dixon-siders’ Gothic predilections and tale-telling tendencies. Some of......
Norman Bluhm

Sensuous Strokes

Peter Frank
New York painter Norman Bluhm evolved from an abstract expressionist to an abstract voluptuist, his arcs and waves of spattered paint frothing into baroque bulges and tumescent swaths of candy-heart color. But Bluhm lost none of his expansiveness and joyous fury in the transition, and his later work, like de......
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Elizabeth Tobias, Dear Mr. Saltz

Peter Frank
It’s a straightforward formula, guileless and visually familiar. Taken with the ideas of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, Elizabeth Tobias speaks his words, translates them into oscilloscopic wave forms, infuses those with color and blows them up really big, into color fields rippled with pulsing asymmetries. The recognizability of the......
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Technical Marvels

Peter Frank
{mosimage} In its slippery exuberance and dependence on impossibilities, Tom Knechtel’s universe goes to great pains to complement rather than repeat ours. Knechtel’s creatures fuse man and beast, the mythic and the quotidian, and he sets them adrift in a space that torques, ripples and folds in on itself, the......