Contributed by Jonathan Agin / Andrew Shea’s work in recent years has evolved from geometric, high-contrast scenes of city bustle to impressionistic vignettes of home life where hues interact with considerably more freedom. Steeped in a quiet domesticity, the paintings in “Grocery Slips” at JJ Murphy Gallery seem idealized only at first glance…
Tag: JJ Murphy Gallery
Farrell Brickhouse: The beat goes on
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Farrell Brickhouse’s recent paintings, on view at JJ Murphy Gallery, embody aging and stamina and the grungy inventiveness that comes with them. In these terms, perhaps the signature piece is Summers End II, tucked away all by itself in the gallery’s rear alcove. Just a foot-and-a-half square, it is a still life of Rauschenberg-grade grit that holds court, depicting what looks like a vase of motley flowers on a stand, waning but defiant in the face of time. Distressed as they are, they look not just alive but capable of aggression. The work is textured in the extreme, Brickhouse having affixed to the canvas the congealed detritus of students’ pigment and painted thickly around it. It’s as though Chaïm Soutine or Frank Auerbach had possessed Morandi and gone to town.
Robert Moskowitz’s visual quartet
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / One thought I had upon seeing Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades at Peter Freeman Inc. was that I could’ve been satisfied to encounter only the large wall of drawings. Arranged loosely yet thoughtfully, in a reconstruction of a wall from the artist’s studio, over sixty works of mostly oil or pastel on paper hang with a kind of majestic poise, each pinned by two thumbtacks in the top corners. Every drawing a vertical, together they present our city: here the finely ridged silhouette of the Empire State Building, there the graceful curve of the Flatiron Building, and, most engrossingly, the dense parallel bars of the World Trade Center from another lifetime ago. Pared down to their essential shapes, the buildings stand resolute in all seasons and moods, whether blue on blue or gray on fleshy pink or black on emerald. Occasionally a hazy ray of moonlight catches a cloud, a hint of atmosphere wafts nearby, or active fingerprints swarm across the paper. These quieter moments play off hard edges in a way that evokes walking home alone after a night out with friends, when New York is at its most still and you feel a flutter of wonder to live in it. What I mean to say is, the wall is a love song to the city.
David Hornung’s whispered secrets
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / There should be a word for the glorious sensation you get when you realize the art in front of you is better than you’d expected, having initially seen it on a screen. You may scoff, “Isn’t everything better in person?,” but I beg to differ. These illuminated contraptions we carry around everywhere are remarkably good at turning life to 11. When I’m rewarded with this aforementioned word-I-don’t-yet-have, I chalk one up for being there. So it was when I stepped into David Hornung’s “New Work,” the inaugural exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery on the LES.




















