Barry Nemett at Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College - Brief Article

Barry Nemett is a heroic teacher, a polymath and a "nice guy" of legendary proportions. This 30-year retrospective neared a room-size installation, large assemblage paintings and various smaller paintings. Dating from the late '60 above 40 early still-lifes depicting works were rendered with fast directness in a lush painterly way. Arrangements vary from work to work; the volumes lean and stack and balance, performing a minuet of sorts. They recall the jesuitical compositions of Morandi.

In big narrative pieces from the late '80 the format is far more mingled Nemett often footnotes the major action with an array of supporting and embellishing images. The imagery is ofttimes augmented by the words of his of frequent occurrence collaborator, the poet Richard Kalter; jumpy overlays of script provide a of the soul counterpoint to the figures which hold a geometric framework.

A multipart piece upon paper, The Unrepentant Jester (1987 132 by dint of 108 inches overall), consists of sum of two units large framed pastels in horizontal format atop each other; they are underscored by means of a predella-like element containing small subsidiary representations The two larger panels present to view us several gangly, disjointed marlonettes; their heartbreaking expressions appear to waver between high tragedy and depressed comedy. Soft grays and rose suffuse the work, enhancing the wafting metrical composition of the themes.

In the early '90 Nemett began making very large assemblages that are storybook rich. For An Owl's Tale (1991 86 through 55 inches), he collaborated one time more with Kalter, and also with his daughter Laini and his son Adam. The work is divided into grids of large and small rectangles and squares, and includes twigs, slices of bark and painted imagery of forests and owl a certain number of of the painted squares contain just the owl's peering organ of visions others offer the owl's head or whole figure. The forests can be variable dark and foreboding; at other times, they are dominated through bright summer green.

The show's largest and greatest in quantity recent work, Crooked Tracks (1998) is an installation of mercurial aspect which occupied a sweep approximately 20 by 35 feet Nemett has also published a novel called flexureed Tracks. There have been four or five versions of this installation at different sites. Here the floor was overspreaded with brown leaves. Model train tracks meandered all above the walls linking birds and forest-lands As in An Owl's Tale, images are partitioned. nearest to a real tree stub are painted woods; birds, the one and the other painted and sculpted, fly end cloudy skies. So dense is the work with visual incident and associations that at times the impact is diminished. turned Tracks needs some blankness here and there. That said, this work, and Nemett's entire retrospective, is a devotional song to living the life and remembering that living.

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