LewAllen Galleries make a split with a Contemporary exhibit and a Modernist one
The difference between Modern and Contemporary, LewAllen Galleries spokeswoman explains tactfully, is that the Modern period generally ran between the Impressionists and the early 1970s and its artists are usually, well, dead.
Except when they’re not.
Audrey Flack, Diane Kell says happily, is very much alive and still working. But Flack has been concentrating on sculpture for 30 years, so the paintings that are opening today at LewAllen Modern are from the right period.
In the next department, LewAllen Contemporary, a show of Beverly McIver’s vivid expressionistic paintings, “Coming Home,” also opens today.
LewAllen’s new split personality — a split between Modern and Contemporary, that is — is a fact on East Palace, and will be equally divided in the LewAllen Galleries opening soon at Encantado resort and in the Railyard, Kell said.
“There are different definitions of the two words,” she says, “but for us Modern art is art in a particular style and from a particular period. It’s a style that became more and more formal in general.”
Contemporary art, Kell says, is more easily defined: “It’s current work by a living artist.” Hmmm. “Yes,” Kell adds, “we think there’s gotten to be a fuzzy line between them, ourselves.” Nevertheless, Flack’s a Modernist (at least in her paintings) and McIver is a Contemporary artist. Both are showing through September; Flack’s show extends into mid-October.
Audrey Flack
The Flack show, of paintings done between 1949 and 1977, chronicles the artist’s development from an abstract expressionist into one of the art world’s foremost photorealists. Known as one of the most original, inventive and influential innovators of 20th-century realism, Flack was an abstract expressionist when it was a revolutionary genre, in the 1940s and ’50s. Later, she went down a different path, leading artists in a progression toward increased figuration.
For Flack, the new realism was rooted in her belief in the power of comprehensible images to communicate expressive themes. Eventually, her work secured her international renown as one of the most collected and respected photo-realists.
The exhibition at LewAllen Modern traces this journey, providing a survey of a single artist’s emerging facility with technique, and her increasing use of photography as the basis for pictorial expression. It also reveals Flack’s wideranging exploration of diverse subject matter from mythic iconography to personal portraiture to public figures and current events.
Beverly McIver
Beverly McIver has courage — using herself and her family, with all the attendant intimacies and insecurities, to make a visual vehicle for discovery and truth. A native of North Carolina, McIver has made a journey that included a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001), nearly a dozen years of painting and teaching in Arizona. Now she has made a physical return to her home country to deal with issues of racial identity, social class, family relationships and self-discovery that she absorbed growing up as a poor, African-American child in the South.
She has a unique approach to painting that critic Irving Sandler in a 2006 ARTnews review called “a brilliant style that verges between Expressionism and Realism.”
McIver’s paintings are noted for raw emotion, with vivid self-portraits — often in blackface or wearing a clown’s red wig — and they have been described as complex comments on stereotypical notions of being African-American, poor and female, coupled with the human propensity to seek authenticity while wrapped in fear of self-disclosure.
“Private Party,” for instance, is a self-portrait of McIver in a floral shift, shaking the red wig that sits atop her dreadlocks. In “Coming Home is Hard,” her greencapped head is thrown back in a scream of frustration.
Her most unusual work is a series of nine self-portraits with eyes closed, titled “Dear God” for the letters to God scrawled across the top of each canvas. More like diary entries, these scribbled notes to God describe events large and small, ranging from Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination to McIver’s frustrations with her state’s Motor Vehicle Division. Curator Lucy Lippard writes in the exhibition catalogue, “Life and art have seldom been so intimately entwined as in Beverly McIver’s paintings. Emerging from her experiences, they are so passionately communicated that the stories they tell become part of the viewers’ lives, however different they may be.”
If You Go
WHAT: Adjunct shows by Beverly McIver and Audrey Flack.
WHEN: LewAllen Contemporary and LewAllen Modern, today. Through Sept. 28 and Oct. 12, respectively. Receptions 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. today.
WHERE: LewAllen Galleries, 129 West Palace Ave.
CONTACT: 988-8897
