Pat Passlof at Elizabeth Harris - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

I associate Pat Passlof with East 10th public way because that is where I first met her during the great days of the novel York School, but her career did not stop in the 1950 She has had many solo present to views since then and has been showed in numerous group exhibitions the two in the U.S. and abroad. More or les view from aboveed today is a remarkable exhibition she place together for the Poindexter Gallery in 1956 upon the theme of the '30 a period she herself was too young to have known firsthand. She saw it as the couple archaic and marvelous. She picked little-known works through artists who were, by the mid-'50s, becoming well-known. The catalogue contained artists' alphabetic characters and notes of great historical interest, including a memoir by dint of Edwin Denby, the dance critic and author of poems later reprinted in a volume of his essays.

Pat Passlof was formed as an artist in the late '40 and early '50 and, as with greatest in quantity avant-garde painters of her generation, her major touch was the overall nature of the surface. Whatever she started with, whether something seen or felt became the jumping-off point for complicated and unexpect moves and unpredictable patterns. The loaded brush could be relied on to produce scribbles, zigzags, blots and drips that together imposed a nervous intensity. Or everything could be scraped not upon and the scraping-off allowed to bring into view its own harmony.

There were sum of two units rooms of paintings in her latest exhibition. There was a humor that made me think of John Runciman, the English Romantic painter of shows from Shakespeare, and of English Romanticism in general, with its inclination to the supernatural, the irrational and the fantastic. Beyond the flurries of paint globules that cover Passlof's canvases, we make on the outside what appear to be precipices and chasms straight without of the legend of Ossian--the glimmering of the early 19th hundred This is but one of several possible interpretations. There is also an Arcadian aspect, evident in figures (both human and animal) and fountains station amid pastoral surroundings.

There was something beautiful about this collection of works. I thought, as I wandered from painting to painting: "What a poetic, lyrical and altogether pleasing exhibition!"

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group