Abstraction
Robert C. Morgan, Jack Walls, Bruce Murphy, Joe Wheaton and Gabriel de la Portilla
Upstairs Photo Gallery: Male Nudes by David Halliday, Newbold Bohemia and Kahn & Selesnick
August 31, 2016
through October 16, 2016
Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present ABSTRACTION, featuring new painting, sculpture and collage by Robert C. Morgan, Jack Walls, Bruce Murphy, Gabriel de la Portilla & Joe Wheaton. The exhibit opens August 31st and will remain on view through October 16th.
For more than 40 years, painter and renowned art critic, Robert C. Morgan, has worked with ideas from the ancient Chinese philosophy, Tao Te Ching, which teaches the direction of nature as “the way”. The result of this fascination culminates in the recent Lissajous series, a body of paintings highlighting spatial relationships and plays of light through geometrical forms in simplistic juxtapositions. Morgan’s interest is captivated by the paradox between the absorption and reflection of light. Hard-edge circles of bronze and silver are set against seemingly black backgrounds of ultramarine and burn umber, a color combination used by the American painter Ad Reinhardt who also explored traditional Asian ideas. While working with geometrical forms and abrupt transitions of color on a two-dimensional plane, Morgan reduces the scale of his work to impart an intimate and focused viewing experience.
Morgan graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a MFA in Sculpture and later received a Ph.D. in contemporary art history from the School of Education at New YorkUniversity. He currently lives in New York where he lectures at the School of Visual Art and is Adjunct Professor at PrattUniversity in the graduate fine arts department.
Painter and poet Jack Walls is considered an ‘inside outsider’ when it comes to his own art making. Working across all mediums including drawing, photo collage, poetry and painting, each work is discovered via Walls’ personal patterns and discipline. “HEADS”, a color series of cubist heads inspired by a collection of African carvings debuted at Glenn Horowitz Gallery in New York City in 2015 and later at the Basilica in Hudson, NY. With approximately 75 paintings in the series, Mr. Walls has moved on, but the core theme remains. A new series, “NEGATIVES”, is a reductive revision of these inspired portraits. Surfaces are stitched together from bits and pieces of canvas before gessoed and painted in black and white. The heads themselves have become more abstracted and gestural in nature, retaining primitive characteristics such as crooked lips and off-centered eyes. Across all mediums, successful themes are repeated and refashioned in Walls’ work as he navigates from one series to the next. The overall effect culminates into a narrative that is at once cohesive while punctuating his unique __DdeLink__48_1210159769">Greatly influenced by literature and music in previous work, mixed media artist, Gabriel de la Portilla, is now reaching into the depths of pure abstraction. Most recently, his work has explored the relationship between stark color, texture and implied depth through a new series of black and white collages of painted and torn pieces of paper that are layered and juxtaposed into abstracts forms. Obscure images begin to appear in the woven bits of paper expressing the artist’s desire to “explore hidden meanings that lie behind what is readily visible, even if it seemingly obfuscates more than clarifies.” Portilla studied studio art at Hunter College CUNY and went on to exhibit largely in the metropolitan area.
Carrie Haddad Gallery is also pleased to present a group photography exhibit in the upstairs gallery, Nude Men, celebrating the male form through the camera lens. The collaborative duo, Kahn & Selesnick, will exhibit three selections from the visual narrative “Dreams of a Drowning World”. An abiding message of this new work speaks to the delicate balance between nature’s luscious beauty and the threat of its loss. Vulnerable and fully exposed, the vertical God-like males portrayed in this exhibit appear peaceful and dreamlike as they float in a motionless marsh of chaos. One male appears upside down, a play on The Hanged Man card that appears in the tarot deck, symbolizing the very human qualities of sacrifice, martyrdom, and putting self interest aside. Newbold Bohemia’s keeps our gaze to the heavens with a new series titledIcarus & Other Mere Mortals. Bohemia puts a contemporary and dare we say very attractive spin on the well known story in Greek Mythology. Hunky men with tattooed forearms tumble gracefully from the sky looking anything but panicked. Puffy white clouds outline the silhouettes of their slender physiques and muscled shoulders as they hover, arrested in time and space, before plunging to their death. Rather they have the peace with hunky men peacefully floating amongst the clouds like angels without wings. A master of light, David Halliday produces lush and elegant images that are both classical and modern. Celebrated for his ‘purist’ eye, he poetically captures the nude male body in a selection of sepia-toned prints from 1996. Two favorites fail to reveal the face of the model; the focus remains on the natural drape of limbs, soft folds of flawless skin, and curvature of the spine. Overall, a stunningly intimate portrayal of the male form done with elegance and charm.
