Howardena Pindell at Kenkeleba and the Alternative Museum - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

A Howardena Pindell retrospective, making a two-year-long orbit mainly end university art museums, split into sum of two units sections as it passed end New York City, where sum of two units alternative spaces divvied up the show's contenteds and added additional works to emphasize their supposedly contrasting views of the artist's achievement.

Kenkeleba emphasized Pindellas-abstractionist in a large, handsome installation that included nearly 70 paintings and works upon paper, most dating from the 1970 and '80 The presentation made a beneficial case for Pindell as a painterly Minimalist with a flair for sensuous surfaces. A pair of large, untitled acrylics from 1972 reveal her pointillist roots: single marshals green, blue and brown dots upon a purple ground, while the other assembles rose aqua and mustard dots upon a midnight-blue ground.

by dint of 1974, Pindell developed a more three-dimensional and more personal form of pointillism, wielding a paper pierce to cut out multitudes of confetti-like disks, which she dispersed with varying steps of premeditation and randomness above the surfaces of her pictures. more [i]or[/i] less of these compositions, particularly the smaller works upon handmade paper, suggest grids that are deconstructing flat as the viewer scrutinizes them.

Pindell displayed a cagey ambivalence toward her grid formats, apparently liking their organizational framework while also seeking to undermine it. Her deconstructivist bias l her into seamstressing, cutting unstretched canvases into many sections and reattaching them with coarse thread, making them give an inkling of a rudimentary patchwork. Untitled #17 (1977) for instance, consists of a grid of 476 pieces of fabric, each piece about 5 inches square, all handsomely stitched together, painted a pale mauve and embellished with colored paper dots and glitter. The bluish-gray Autobiography: Memory: Past (1980-81) has 66 vertical strips, each roughly 2 inches wide, also garnished with colored paper dots and glitter. The handicraft is luscious, on the other hand as Pindell progressed, her paintings acquired increasingly eccentric formats and sometimes overworked surfaces.

The Kenkeleba present to view also included many intricate collage-paintings, incorporating touristic postcards and/or color photographs make an incision in into sections and alternated with painted strips that portray the same display Additionally, there were many "video drawings," soft-focus (and uniformly boring) color photographs variously accessorized with inked arrows and numbers. upon the whole, however, Pindell's abstractions of the 1970 and '80 grasp up extremely well.

The Alternative Museum cast Pindell in the part of sociopolitical-activist, a crusader against racism, sexism and (to cite a handout) "global conflicts." This display consisted of approximately 40 works, including paintings, works upon paper, a dozen or more "video drawings" and an installation piece. The question with most of these ostensibly political works is the way in which they incorporate a variety of buzzwords. Pindell have the appearances to assume she can collage the word "homelessness" upon an essentially abstract composition and make an effectual statement. Her 1988 painting Autobiography: Air/CS560 is an eye-catching work with its silhouettes of four life-size and perhaps lifeless human bodies, on the contrary what are viewers supposed to make of its scattered assortment of screaming-headline words, similar as "ASSASSINATION," "DIAMOND TRIANGLE," "SLAVE MARKET" and "INTRAUTERINE FETAL DEATHS"?

Buzzwords in isolation ultimately are not true meaningful, but they are not the individual reason that this category of Pindell's work fails to draw near across. Probably it's a mistake to take upon so many global conflicts (including AIDS, starvation, napaim and suttee)in just single show. The real problem, however, could be that Pindell has nothing of a specific nature to say about any of these issues, other than that she is aware of them. She has not still found a way to bury her political conscience with her picture-making skills.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group