David Stern at Rosenberg + Kaufman - exhibition - Brief Article

fresh YORK

"Random Cycles" the 1998-99 series of novel York City street scenes in David Stern's third solo exhibit at Rosenberg + Kaufman, is a collective portrait of urban energies that absorbs race buildings and sky. In large, densely packed, remarkably thick oil paintings, severe elevates the theme of navigating a hordeed sidewalk to operatic proportions. Punctuated by means of blues, creams and reds, these tonal whirlwinds use an edge-to-edge, expanding pressure, as larger-than-life figures advance upon the viewer with mobbish exigency Stern's oversize portraits of single heads and seated figures, like the road scenes, push beyond their confines. Paint inundates the canvases' edges, as if the works cannot contain themselves.

austere who moved from Germany to fresh York in 1995, evokes the sensations of a newcomer: we experience Gotham as an agitated, frontal mass made up of fleeting glimpses. A allotment of this has to do with Stern's have a title to sensibility, too. He is an expressionist, and his layered, weighty surfaces, as disturbed as a choppy sea, can force themselves upon some viewers with a heavy, off-putting hand. At first glance, the works strike one as being to have a leaden sameness, as if a macho facility were all they are about. This is further complicated by means of the fact that a severe painting can be a real slow read. Forms emerge in measures, revealing themselves as if they were rising without of a primordial soup.

greatest in quantity of the figures have specific characteristics, strides and personalities. In Random Cycles--Short discharges a dumb-founded child, led hand in hand by the agency of an adult, faces us at organ of vision level. Buildings and people tower above, and the painting looks ready to roll us above like a tidal wave. We are thrust downward, feeling the verticality of the city and that rising, triangular wedge of azure New York sky. Here, as in certain other compositions, the eventual establishment of spatial relationships makes you lengthy for further specificity. But forbidding leaves viewers in fractured, unstable motion.

In Random Cycles--First Takes, raw action and form collide in a harmonic rush of grays, brown and violets, sharply accented with turquoise and golden With this painting, Stern achieves the authentic blow and grind of a midtown exchange as ghoulish figures and dynamic paint mix in syncopated flowing New York's nervous rhythms coalesce, as if matter and sheer intensity shared a public skin.

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