Content provided in partnership with
Jenny Hankwitz at Cheryl Pelavin - showing of paintings
Art in America, June, 2003 by Grady T. Turner
In Jenny Hankwitz's riotous large-scale paintings, flat vivid colors and explosive splash patterns bound and swirl, slipping giddily toward the edges as if daring the canvas to contain them. Many of the 14 oil paintings in her third solo show in New York were painted during a sojourn in New Mexico, a landscape that has inspired artists as diverse as Georgia O'Keeffe and Krazy Kat creator George Herriman.
Blasting Hot Day and Cool Starry Night, each 90 by 42 inches, play off the extremes of the desert in their use of color. In the former, a bright blue field is obscured by a boldly outlined white shape that could be a hybrid of fan blades and cartoon bunny ears; this is obscured in turn by beige splots and orange splats, as if someone had dropped paint-filled balloons on the canvas. The white shape shows up again in the latter, now against a dark background and festooned with a swirling stroke and pastel blue and yellow splats.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The seemingly wild abandon of the splash patterns might suggest that these compositions are dependent upon random occurrences, until one notices that, like the white shape, suspiciously similar forms recur in several paintings. The work Fearless, for instance, has green, blue and gray splashes moving in from separate corners. The contours of the gray shape are repeated in Slip, only now it is blue, with contrasting black, white and red splats against pink.
These recurrences are rooted in Hankwitz's process, which begins at the computer, where scans of brushstrokes and ink spills are worked into compositions that are then transferred to canvas. She does not follow the design by rote, as revealed by the pentimenti of alterations made during the painting process. A selection of watercolors and prints, also on view, made it clear that she also works quite handily with direct processes and a more muted palette. Any artist working with flat colors and cartoonish imagery is inevitably compared to Roy Lichtenstein--in this instance, his later brushstroke paintings leap to mind--but the works on paper bear equal comparison to Brice Marden's calligraphic drawings.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
