Manny Farber. (Rosa Esman Gallery, New York, New York)

Artforum International, October, 1993 by Pagel, David

Looser and more insouciant than anything he has painted, Manny Farber's most recent amalgams of landscape, still life, and symbolic self-portraiture are at once more relaxed and aggressive, jam-packed and freewheeling than any of his representational pictures from the past twenty years. In the past, straightforward oppositions between figure and ground, abstraction and representation, form and content informed Farber's cleverly self-referential and often slyly humorous works. In his new pictures, these well-worn formal issues are overwhelmed by an excess of visual energy--bravura brushwork, juicy underpainting, keyed-up colors, jaunty juxtapositions, and expanded scale.

Beginning in the winter of 1991, Farber's art took a turn to the liquid. The potted plants,...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.