Tag: Fran Shalom

Solo Shows

Karin Davie: Totally tubular

Contributed by Amanda Church / Conjuring The Cure’s 1987 song Just Like Heaven – which proclaims “you’re just like a dream” – Karin Davie’s eight new large-scale paintings on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, all oil on linen, transport us to a realm of sensation and association. Here her wavy imagery, which she has been developing in one form or another since the 1990s, immediately evokes the swells and dips of the ocean’s surface as well as recalling the fluid lines essential to the work of painters like Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Bridget Riley, Moira Dryer, and late de Kooning, albeit to varying effect.

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Solo Shows

Fran Shalom: Merging vernaculars

Contributed by Adam Simon / I’ve been aware of Fran Shalom’s paintings for a while and have been interested in how at times they seem like a comic version of abstract painting. She excels at what I would call formal wit, eliciting not a belly laugh but a knowing smile from those familiar with the vernacular. Her humor is a foil of sorts, providing cover for a serious investigation into the way shapes can carry associations and embody feelings. Looking at one of Shalom’s paintings can be as psychologically charged as an encounter with an eccentric person. My assumption is that the paintings are arrived at, as the title of her current show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, “Everyday Improvisations,” suggests, through trial and error.

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Group Shows

Chromatic propulsion at Frosch & Co.

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Out of the Blue” at Frosch & Co boasts a tight concept and adds real snap to the conversation presumed suspended until after Labor Day. The idea is to explore how the color blue ramifies through the lenses of different painters. That might seem like a merely modular survey, since other colors too have distinct connotations. But blue’s, as the gallery’s press statement notes, seem to swing more dramatically – between cool and warm, masculine and feminine, obscene and pure, barbaric and royal, stormy and serene. This quality makes for an unusually rich array.

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Solo Shows

Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom: Heirs to Nozkowski

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski was widely and deservedly recognized for making intimately scaled abstract paintings using an idiosyncratic visual language that was derived from the visual and emotional stimuli of everyday life. Since his death in 2019, I’ve often wondered who might be the next Nozkowski. Given the trend towards figuration, mixed-media surfaces, and massive scale, precious few painters seemed to be walking in his humble footsteps. Now we have Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom.

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Museum Exhibitions Studio Visit

Fran Shalom: Finding weight and presence (with humor)

Contributed by Sharon Butler / I went to visit Fran Shalom’s studio in Jersey City on the occasion of her first solo museum show, “Duck/Rabbit” at the Hunterdon in Clinton, New Jersey. Continuing a conversation we’d started at “Groping For the Elephant,” Shalom’s 2021 solo show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea., we discussed surface, shape, ambiguity, and the confidence painters develop over time. “Duck/Rabbit” was curated by Mary Birmingham and opens on October 2.

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