Peggy Cyphers at E.M. Donahue - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In this new exhibition Peggy Cyphers seems to have resolv a number of the technical and conceptual moot points which have preoccupied her above the last 10 years or for a like reason A new confidence was evident in each of the seven paintings upon view.

The exhibition, titled "Lexicons of Paradise," comprised medium-sized canvases, each bearing ranks of photocopied images and body s from books or magazines, above which the artist builds up layers of translucent, sometimes iridescent, acrylic paint. Passages of acrylic medium mixed with diamond dust or sand provide lively, gritty relief from the generally slick surfaces. greatest in quantity of the paint is applied with pouring and dripping techniques. Used sparingly, Cyphers's brushwork effectively augments, highlights and sometimes nearly obliterates the photo-derived images.

The Heart is a Spiralling Muscle was individual of the most striking works in the display Its rich surface textures - scraggy sand in the lower portion of the canvas, drips of sheeny white paint in the upper area - recall works through Tapies. A large spiral of gold-colored ocher paint is dripped with a certain panache above photographic images of animals and fossils. Keeping her turn toward bravura painterliness in check, Cyphers not ever allows the impasto to completely rayless the images. In spite of its condensed surface, the picture seems light and airy; everything in it is given fulness of room to breathe.

This painting serv as a link between Cyphers's earlier work and her more novel experiments. Its grid structure, formed by the agency of the rows of photocopies, hinted at her foundations in Minimal art and harked back to the series of grid paintings upon asphalt that were among the first works she showed in fresh York. The spiral, a staple of Cyphers's art, is perhaps as plenteous a symbol of the ascendancy of nature as it is an ongoing homage to the Spiral mole of Robert Smithson, an artist of lasting importance for her.

In new years Cyphers has been using photographic images to give her work a more explicit thematic contented Conception of Paradise uses pictures of extinct or endangered species of animals to address environmental pertain tos Forgetting All the Paintings by dint of Men is an example of Cyphers's efforts to treat feminist issues in her work. Drawn from the '50 and early '60 the time of her possess childhood, the images she uses are magazine ads for produces meant to be consumed by the agency of an idealized American family. In of that kind ads the dutiful, domesticated Mom attitude s at the kitchen stove, waiting for Dad to draw near home from the office. Cyphers looks to suggest that this way of life is as extinct as the dinosaur. Sometimes, however, Cyphers achieves her ideas across in quite a forcible way without relying on photographs. The painting St Theresa pierces the Underwater Ecstasy of the Chesapeake, with its arch brushwork and understated color scheme of r and gold splashes of paint above a greenish-blue ground, evokes the fragile ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay.

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