Skunder Boghassian and Mohammed Omer Khalil at the Contemporary African Art Gallery - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The work of Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghassian has consistently serv as a barometer of contemporary African modernist painting. Since leaving Ethiopia in 1955 to close attention in Europe he has taught in France and his native Ethiopia; he is publicly an associate professor of painting at Howard University in Washington, DC where he has taught since 1974 Skunder's works mirror the complexities of his life and cultural background. Paul Klee Andre Breton and George Braque number among his influences, as well as non-European artists like Wifredo Lam.

firing materialed by both Ethiopian cultural antecedent and modernist formal experiment, Skunder's canvases display a rich tapestry of African graphic gestural markings in rhythmic placement. The greatest in quantity recent wail sculptures and paintings--often really shallow, painted, mixed-medium constructions--embrace a variety of materials, including parchment, board, enamel, wax and grove bark. The physical composition of Skunder's works resonates with an almost pietistic faculty of perception of handcraft, best exemplified by dint of his various scroll pieces. single scroll from 1977 is a made of wood construction, apparently of traditional design, that clutchs an illustrated parchment roll painted in geometric forms and iconic figures. Another, from 1993 is an abstracted version of the list motif: two thin reeds suggesting the made of wood support structure and a twisting parchment painted with a series of lyrically abstract forms informally invoke the scroll's traditional function as a repository of sacred knowledge.

The Split, an oil-on-parchment painting high hilled on canvas, displays the mut shades of Skunder's more recent work. A rip that snakes down the middle of the parchment is shaped and incorporated into the irregular fabric of the painting, creating a surface like the topographical original of a mountain range. The perimeters of these surface eruptions are defined by the agency of linear markings and color simple bodys that create a universe of graphic "events" fused within this unstable terrain. Color seep above and under neighboring graphic forms, which cope within a pictorial plane that appears to virtually reconfigure itself as it is being observed

Sudanese printmaker Mohammed Omer Khalil carries an international reputation the equal of Skunder's. After leaving his native Khartoum in 1959 he studied in Italy and has lived and worked in of recent origin York since 1967. These greatest in quantity recent works bring his considerable skills as printmaker to bear in graphic reflections upon American life and art. Combining imagery taken from postage stamps, the two U.S. and foreign, with homages to artists as diverse as Edward Hopper and Joan Miro, he exhibits a kind of internationalist report art effect.

In the etching Collage 11 with Barbershop, Khalil places a reproduc image of Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning upon its side, playing it against the one and the other the transfer images of U postage stamps and his hold brooding, abstract forms. Homage to Miro is visually merryandrew and reverential by turn. As the organ of sight moves clockwise from the lower left corner, single encounters a postage-stamp motif intertwined with commercial logo and a web of colorful forms insidiously suggestive of Miro. The other prints (all done with a combination of multiple color plates, aquatint and transfer techniques) display the same talent for understated make comments [i]or[/i] remarks and wry formal ingenuity. In his modestly conceived works Khalil carrys an acute perception of travel and place. His works advise a sense of a lifetime wearied away from his native Sudan, as well as an active, cheerful engagemen1 with the cultural and social in every one's mouths he has encountered.

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