Paul Brach at Flomenhaft

In title and composition, a number of Paul Brach's abstractions of the last 10 years or so allude to the Pythagorean concept of the music of the spheres--palpable manifestations of the notion that heavenly bodies emanate sounds in their wheeling progress through space. In oil on canvas, the works are for the most part composed of painterly, modulated color fields centrally figured by mandala-like disks or scattered clusters of spheres of differing dimensions, hues graded to achieve the illusion of volume. Selected for Brach's first solo exhibition in New York since 1998, the 15 paintings on view date from 1992 to 2005 and represent a career in the arts that spans 60 years.

Music of the Spheres (Desert Serenade), 1992, invokes Brach's adolescent summers as a cowboy on an Arizona ranch. Vivid with the crimson and mauves of bougainvillea, the 40-by-48-inch painting reveals a distant, craggy, mountainous landscape rising above a desert floor. The sky is suffused with clouds that are in turn dotted with crimson spheres of various dimensions that appear to rush toward the picture plane. The proportionally larger Music of the Spheres (Shocking Pink Polka), 2002, is wholly aglow with the color suggested by Brach's title, the disks appearing to float through deepest space.

The square-format paintings of the series "The Geometry of Faith," from the late '90s, consist of dominant mandala forms. At 60 inches on a side, The Geometry of Faith (I Form the Light and Create Darkness), 1999, is vertically bifurcated, one half of the concentric circles ranging from light to dark gray at the center and the other half shifting from an outermost dark to light. The mandala of The Geometry of Faith (Sinai), 1999, evolves from deep magenta at its core to blues. Barely visible are abstracted Mosaic tablets and the peak on which, by tradition, they were received. In each case, the parenthetical portion of the title in this series is lettered across the painting's lower edge in a classic upper-case Roman font.

Red Shift and Force Field (both 2004) return to the theme of the music of the spheres, with many small disks emerging from a central cluster. The paintings of Brach's most recent series, "Sky Portal," are related by size and iconography in two examples included here. Sky Portal #1 and Sky Portal #2 (both 2005 and 48 inches square) appear to give on to deep blue space like casement windows opening to the void.

A student of Grant Wood at the University of Iowa and an infantry soldier at Omaha Beach, Brach was later founding dean of CalArts. He showed in the annual exhibitions of Stable Gallery and was among the first artists represented by Leo Castelli. Once a cowboy, he is to this day a horseman. Brach and his wife, the artist Miriam Shapiro, live and work in East Hampton.

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