NYTimes art reviews: Talese, Ossorio

“Pamela Talese: Working Waterfront, Paintings of the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” Atlantic Gallery, New York, NY. Through Oct. 20. Talese paints straightforward images of the working ships, tugboats, and docks of the industrial waterfront. Roberta Smith reports that “the total effect is unexpectedly convincing, all the more so because each painting is accompanied by a brief text explaining its subject. The added information suspends this work somewhere between a belated W.P.A. project and a conservative variation on Conceptual Art�s image-text combination, by now a tradition of its own.” Read more.“Alfonso Ossorio: Masterworks from the Collection of the Robert U. Ossorio Foundation,” Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY. Through Oct. 27. Ken Johnson, back at the NYTimes, reports “Viewers happening upon works by Alfonso Ossorio (1916-90) for the first time might guess he was a great hippie artist. He was actually one of the most original, albeit underappreciated, members of the Abstract Expressionist generation. Born into a wealthy Philippine family, he attended Harvard and settled permanently in the United States in 1952….Influenced as much by Surrealism as by the formal innovations of vanguard European and American artists, Mr. Ossorio made intensely sensuous paintings and wall-mounted assemblages that seem imbued with otherworldly vision and shamanistic magic.” Read more.