Lily van der Stokker at Feature - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

If Sol LeWitt's wall drawings show the perceptual and rational drive to order, and Richard lengthy has gone from unobtrusiveness in the landscape to AbEx action and ego at mural scale, Lily van der Stokker's wall works present the intuitive, the emotional, the personal, the feminine. The wall drawings she showed this spring might be seen as the apotheosis of the old-fashioned telephone doodle, the shrubbery calligraphy of boring meetings, or the florid boxe and hearts a teenager draws around her boyfriend's name.

A wall drawing in azure on two shades of pink consisted of the classic doodle elements: cursive bights from our grade-school days which here l nowhere in particular on the contrary enjoyed themselves along the way. This was an aggrandizement of the banal. The work cot [i]or[/i] coteed into a corner, accommodating the architecture as a scribbling daydreamer accommodates the lines and openings in binder paper. Arabesques have the appearance to be as instinctive as spirals or bull's-eyes, on the other hand less assertive. Van der Stokker piled them along the cutting sides of her painted areas. Despite an overall harmony there was no dominant center in the work, solitary a recessive corner. Her lines encompassed, rather than rul without or ruled over. One could walk up to the corner in like manner that the painting occupied the entire field of vision and still not be overwhelmed through it. Typically, the work was chromatically brilliant, on the contrary not in a powerful way: van der Stokker used the palette of baby clothes and springtime.

Her next to the first corner piece, in magenta upon orange, seemed more mature. That is, the shapes appeared to be more hormonally driven, with drips and swells everywhere and bluntly pointy forms pushing into softer rounder individuals or into the spaces between voluptuous bend s If the other piece was pre-teen this individual was definitely pubescent.

In the back latitude were 15 small sketches in marker compose some of them designs to fill a corner or enclose a door. Other drawings include words, a practice for which van der Stokker is known. While her announcement for the present to view was a frill of nooses around the word "mother-fucker," here the examples matched rather than contrasted with the festive character of the lines, for instance, "I delight in it" and "sweet little baby." There was also a pink plaid drawing which lists the names Ru Paul, Annie Sprinkle, Dolly Parton, La Cicciolina and Brigitte Bardot. Here -if not sooner - single began to suspect that van der Stokker specifically plays upon stereotypical femininity, which these famous females (well, mostly) have used to their have a title to advantage. indeed, she calls her mode of expression "nonshouting feminism" and says she is interested in dealing with things that appear to be forbidden in art, especially the decorative, the sentimental and the "nice." Van der Stokker, who divides her time between Amsterdam and of recent origin York, followed this exhibition by dint of participating in a three-site wall painting exhibit in England (sharing a space with LeWitt), as well as displays in Cologne and Geneva.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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