Ida Kohlmeyer at Mary Ryan - painting and sculpture exhibition, New York, New York

Between the chaos of immediate perception and the ordered discipline imposed through the understanding, there is an intermediate stage where bits and pieces of reality drift about like flotsam and jetsam upon the open ocean. Or for a like reason one feels when looking at the paintings of Ida Kohlmeyer Her canvases proffer collections of freely drawn ultimate parts that hover between abstraction and representation. Sometimes each is isolated in its possess little box, but more oftentimes they simply coexist without apparent interconnection. single thinks of the drawings of children in which equal weight is given to each separate part.

It may be of the like kind a dismissal of hierarchy that enables the works to carry a delightful sense of freedom. ofttimes individual motifs have a pictographic quality. In the painting Synthesis 93-1 for instance, individual can make out a wheel, a snail, an apple, a child's house drawing, a cactus that may be a hand and a pair of arrows. on the contrary unlike pictograms, these simplified uncompounded bodys do not seem to stand for anything on the other hand themselves.

Kohlmeyer has execut the paintings in a quick, unfinished manner with bold black outlines and hastily filled-in areas of color. single suspects that her roots in Abstract Expressionism include an interest in automatic writing. The relations are largely to nature and the domestic sphere. single painting, Semiotics 91-D, is filled with shapes that put in mind of water-- dominating the center is a columnar uncompounded body which might be a fountain, while other parts refer to lakes, rivers or a following of waves on the beach. Elsewhere in the exhibit one finds hints of fogs mountains, hearts, tree stumps, melon halves and doors.

In the paintings, these figures appear against a flat and neutral loam Paradoxically, pictorial devices and qualities like as perspective and illusion, which Kohlmeyer does not use in her paintings, play a part in her painted aluminum statuarys several examples of which were included in the display Composed of stacks of eccentric quasi-geometric forms that might have been culled from the free-floating shapes in the paintings, the plastic arts have a cubistic quality. They are brightly painted with the same mix of line and color that characterizes the paintings, and they stand out out and curve back, playing with optical illusions and changing in appearance as single moves around them.

Together the paintings and statuarys stake out a territory for Kohlmeyer that is all her hold Merging the freshness of a child's unshackleed vision with a sophisticated modernist's approach to form, they bring us back to a second when everything seemed possible.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group