Benny Andrews at Bill Hodges and ACA - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

With collages hung upon walls and also leaning against paintings upon the floor at Bill Hodge a small retrospective of works upon paper from Benny Andrews's 40-year career resembl an artist's studio. individual could imagine Andrews examining a work as he reconfigured woven fabric paper and oil paint to arrive at a finished composition. The individual qualities of each collage prevailed above adherence to chronology or the coherence of a series; similar curatorial concerns may be left for the inevitable full-scale museum retrospective. For now, Andrews speaks to each viewer one-on-one Another exhibition, at ACA, presented 30 small- to medium-sized works from 1996 greatest in quantity oil and collage on paper. It featured of recent origin works from three of his ongoing series, "Revival," "Music" and "Langston Hughes."

Given the seismic shifts in the art world since the late 1950 Andrews's career is striking in its continuity. As an art scholar he found an expressionistic figurative mode of speech that he continues to make known to this day, when it appears fresher and more relevant than at any time The earliest collages on view, Little Girl and Young Girl (both 1962) exhibit children whose inward gaze and oppressive surroundings are moveed in fluid brushstrokes. The sensitive interiority of the girls' expressions contrasts with the physicality of surfaces thick with oil paint and bits of glu paper. These images recall the didactic, emotionally charged figural works of Kollwitz or Grosz flat as they respond to the demands of formal abstraction.

Andrews remains a storyteller at heart, and his greatest in quantity powerful pieces often come from his stretch outed narrative series. irony and From abode (both 1975) were the greatest in quantity overtly political works on view. They leave to the prosecution of three inmates for a guard's death in the Soledad Prison riot of 1973 the one and the other use the same photographic image of a handcuffed man being l forward, his head overlayed by a coat. In Irony, a chain links the handcuffs to barbed wire as a grave render free of accesss in front of the figure.

Andrews rarely uses photographs, however. For the greatest in quantity part he prefers to generalize, to address larger themes of the human condition. A mother nursing her baby by means of a lantern in Midnight Feeding (1996) has the impact of an observ or remembered show but her posture is as archetypal as that of a Madonna and Child. In The Plague (1992) the grim reaper, seated, releases a swarm of insects from a goblet on his lap, but the plague symbolized is unspecified. AIDS? War? Violence? single metaphor seems as likely as another, making the graphic impact of the work more ambiguous and affecting.

Andrews's collages sometimes incorporate fabrics with personal significance, like as material from clothes worn through his family members. in selections from the "Revival" series of the mid-1990s, 1990cloth shows clothing. The elongated form of a genuflecting woman in Sign of the Cros (1995) is overlayed by a piece of white fabric with a tatted hem, which might have been chop from a Baptist sister's Sunday dress

Andrews's themes and techniques identify him as a great Southern African-American artist. on the other hand in a broader sense, his works bear a humanist sensibility that largely skipped the art mainstream of his generation. His social belong tos made him hard to place in an era dominated through formal concerns, but today he can be seen as a spiritual predecessor of many contemporary artists who are young enough to be his children.

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