Tag: Paul Feeley

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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Solo Shows

Paul Feeley: When paintings want to be sculptures

Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Paul Feeley: The Shape of Things” is Garth Greenan Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for the painter, who died in 1966. But it is the first to ask – and answer – what happened when Feeley, known for re-introducing geometry to post-war abstraction, grew tired of his signature style. This show at last gives proper attention to Feeley’s drive to move beyond the flatness of the canvases he had been producing for years.

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Solo Shows

Ted Stamm’s conceptual adventurism

Contributed by Saul Ostrow / When Ted Stamm’s career was cut short by his death at age 39 in 1984, he had already begun to attract attention in the United States and internationally. Critics including Edit deAk, Peter Frank, Robert Morgan, and Kay Larson recognized Stamm’s ability to bridge formal rigor with playful urban references. In 1975, deAk wrote in Artforum that “Stamm’s work confounds its own apparent simplicity; the shape’s tense complexity and stubborn definition of itself make it totally the artist’s like an insignia. The color is equally personal, and the painting’s presence is quietly assertive. This is certainly not the elegant nihilism of reductive solutions.” Conceptual endeavors were central to his ambition of making the border between art and everyday life porous.

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