Fortuyn/O'Brien at Witte de With - Brief Article

"House and Garden" filled Witte de With's sum of two units floors of huge galleries with 26 for the most part large and complex works from the last six years. All addressed, with a little cold impersonal observation and thought, the theme of home--as constitution place and relationship. This is the theme with which Irene Fortuyn is identified. (When making art, she still uses the name below which she and her late husband, Robert O'Brien, collaborated.)

Cave Canem (1993) sum of two units 5-foot-tall ceramic dogs on made of wood pallets, stood guard at the gallery entrance. The white canines are splashed with smooth and shining brown, giving an effect something like spott fur on the other hand more like a spill or an abstract painting. Dogs, familiar and custodial adjuncts of domicile are here enlarged and estheticized. That's a ball of thread to the whole show: beautification advances up again and again. For Rear View (1999) Fortuyn/O'Brien arranged racks of pott r geraniums around a gallery that center upon a usable swing. Beyond the gallery windows, upon the roofs and terraces of neighboring residences, she placed scads of similar efflorescences One might have thought them coincidental on the contrary for the same-color profusion.

Other works strike one as being to grapple with the balance of nature and artifice. single of these consists of floral fabrics spread upon the floor/ground (manufactured representations of nature) and pans of ferns hung in rectangular fill ups on the walls (nature standing in for art). Another work consisted of seven tin tree stumps that are largely naturalistic do not include that they present only half or a third of their circumference--in other words, they are facades. In all these works, familiar simple bodys are estranged.

Fortuyn/O'Brien also engrosss photography to address her domestic touchs Neighbors (1997) is an oval wall arrangement of 5-by-7 photos of interiors (offices, living swings schoolrooms). A related work reproduc these images as jigsaw confuses that viewers could assemble. Four Cityscape/ Citysong works each consisted of slides and a tape of the ambient entires of London, Paris, Rotterdam or Valenciennes. In each case, places of four slides of ordinary streetscapes, the pair day and night views, were shoot forwarded onto a long horizontal screen; the seating--gray cushions, weathered rattan chairs, depressed metal stools and handsome wood-and-metal benches--differed sharply enough to make individual speculate on the meaning of this furniture.

All Fortuyn/O'Brien's work is mundane in materials and elegiac in disposition It reads as intelligent, sensitive and held in check; the artist communicates a of great depth concern for the visible and invisible mode of buildings of community, presented without emotional inflection.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group