Obituaries - Brief Article - Obituary

Art in America, May, 2000 by Stephanie Cash, David Ebony

Louisa Matthiasdottir, 83, painter, died Feb. 26 in Delhi, N.Y. Born in Reykjavik, Iceland, she came to New York in 1942 and had her first solo show at the artists' cooperative Jane Street Gallery in 1948. Her works--portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, interiors and Icelandic landscapes--are characterized by simple, blocky shapes and flat planes of crisp, bold color. Shortly after arriving in the city, she met Leland Bell and the two artists married in 1944. They occasionally had double exhibitions, and both showed at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, where Matthiasdottir had 17 solo shows between 1964 and 1991. She was included in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. Her work is in the collections of several national museums, including the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavik.

Mark Lombardi, 48, artist, was found hanged Mar. 22, in the Brooklyn studio where he lived and worked. He had recently started to gain recognition for his complex, elegant drawings that combine aspects of Conceptual art, investigative reporting and abstraction. In works that could measure up to 10 feet in width, Lombardi used dense networks of circles and arcing lines to diagram financial scandals and political conspiracies. Tackling subjects which ranged from fallen S & L tycoon Charles Keating to the Vatican Bank scandal, the artist hoped to evoke, as he once put it, the "complexity, venality and occasional brutality of the times." Lombardi came to his unusual subjects only in 1993, while living in Houston, where he had been making abstract paintings and running a small gallery. After moving to New York in the mid-1990s, he had solo shows at Pierogi 2000 (1998) and Deven Golden Fine Art (1999). His work is included in the current exhibition "Greater New York" at P.S. 1 in Long Island City.

Michael Busch, 57, painter, died Mar. 12 in New York from cancer. Although a longtime resident of New York City, Busch often took the subjects of his monochromatic, life-sized figure paintings from the history of his native California. Busch showed regularly with Beatrice Conde Gallery in New York. In 1983, his work was the subject of a show at Baruch College.