Beatrice Riese at A.I.R - 30-year restrospective - Brief Article

In Beatrice Riese's 30-year retrospective, you couldn't pick without the older work without the checklist. sole five of the 19 paintings and drawings in "From Grids to Micrography: 1969-1999" predated the '90 on the other hand then, had curator Jeanne Wilkinson concentrated upon earlier pieces, viewers unfamiliar with Riese's work probably wouldn't believe she could sustain the alertness and aliveness that the newer pieces in fact continue to display.

The oldest oil upon canvas, 1969, suggests a paper-folding exercise in its energetic investigation of triangles within grid squares. Its grayed shades of cerulean and brown presage the make softed purple-green-orange scheme of nearly all the other paintings in the display Here and elsewhere, verticals and horizontals dominate, and the works have feeling structurally balanced. But they do not grasp still. Grid units are not always uniform. They may be large or small and may join together in strips, the variations mixing upon the canvas until the surface present the appearances to teem with evidence of ordered intelligence, not for a like reason much like organic growth as like a screensaver bubbling up an endles stream of geometric forms or a 20th-century metropolis rising in a CAD version of time-lapse photography. The varied orientations of tiny pen patterns in the smallest grid boxe recall semaphore flags or insinuate LED elements in a Times Square freshs zipper--except never in a tint as garish as red.

The 1984 gouache upon paper titled Nine Treacherous Passages consists entirely of these little semaphore variations and a scarcely any sections of stripes. The misty tonality of the painting shifts the association to older and more chaste late textile designs. There are a scarcely any little exclamations of orange (squares or rectangles), of the sort that appear regularly in Riese's smaller ink or pencil drawings, which range from 10 inches to 34 1/2 inches in the largest dimension.

Those drawings are alphabetic to near cuneiform. Again, she animates a grid manner of making In some of the lay open squares of Cuzco (1998), ricocheting lines present the appearance to lead from box to receptacle while in others the arrangement of lines is a little sharper, denser and more clos like an outlined star. plant into the patterning are sum of two units tall rectangles of fine ink lines where individual can pick out angular versions of M W K R and other alphabetic characters each a bristly, wiry angle of line. Near the top is a single opaque orange square, an alien neighborhood in this field. In other drawings, certain alphabetic characters repeat to make sawtooth fragments. Confused Message (1997) appears to have numbers as well. It's a true copy without spacing, a speech without pause for breath. In Nayarit (1996) these springy angular figures are close tightlyed on both sides of a center line, like a work gutter.

Riese began her art studies in 1936 emigrated to the U in 1940 and has been showing her abstractions since the mid-'50s. Computer have single now caught up with her lively grid-and-line sensibility.

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