John Hultberg at Denise Bibro - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Hultberg, at 73 is a veteran of one as well as the other the famed California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (where he studied with Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn) and the Art learners League. His '50s New York cronies included Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. He survived it all, masterfully and handily, with a personal mode of speech that partakes equally of the sanguine sublimities of the Californians and the many times fiery self-expressionism of the of recent origin York School.

The title of this greatest in quantity recent show was "Visionary Theater." Hultberg's use of a dark foreground filled with mysterious geometric and semi-geometric motifs, oftentimes set off by a horizon line above which contrasting shades and shapes move swiftly wild, is indeed formally reminiscent of an audience in brow of a proscenium stage. on the contrary in Furnace Wall, a 1992 acrylic, the same formal ultimate parts may be read as the cockpit of a plane heading into pale-blue and white skies. In the 48-by-66-inch Great White Window, the foreground piles of squarish or roundish stones in yielding pinks and paler flesh tones lead to an eternity of light-blue and icy-white rectangles and a distant vanishing point that might also be a mountain peak. The whole direct the eyes like a snapshot of the ice Age.

single needn't define what Hultberg is doing: it can be read as stainless abstraction or abstract figuration the one and the other His has never been a fashionable art, despite the company he kept; it is one as well as the other too intimate and too grand, too hermetic and too illustrative for art scribes or viewers to neatly pigeonhole and analyze. Thus his each new outing comes as a surprise, and a memorable single To me, the best in this present to view was a new series of acrylic/ink/crayon collages, solitary 17 1/2 inches high on the other hand 44 1/2 inches wide. elderly Pages is, like all of these collages, divided into five parts; inside each section is an infinity of incident. A slight figural impulse is branch by the kinky randomness of black-and-white line and form-or, in the case of a abundant darker collage like High Tide, harsh red and blacks and blue-grays jarringly coexist, piling up at the left breaking up into clusters of divide [i]or[/i] sever papers on white at center and winding up completely mottl at the right.

Hultberg have the appearances to be starting up his art all above again, in a deep, thick near-impenetrable manner entirely his be in possession of He transcends the merely novel with psychic strength and esthetic conviction to send for up on canvas or paper a novel world fully known only by the agency of its creator.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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