The Art Scene 06.16.11
A New Gallery,
A Russian Artist
The Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art Gallery has opened at 28 Job’s Lane in Southampton and is showing the works of Henry Bing, Richard Ericson, James Knox, Charles Levier, and Abraham Rattner and featuring the paintings of Nahum Tschacbasov. The gallery has another space on Madison Street in Sag Harbor, which is showing large-format works by Tschacbasov.
Tschacbasov, who died in 1984, was born in Baku, in the southeast of Russia, in 1899. His family settled in Chicago when he was 8, and his painting career began in the 1930s with work done in Social Realism and his satirical depiction of social injustice. He fused Cubism and Surrealism in the 1940s. From the 1950s until his death, he concentrated on the spiritual forces of the past using a Byzantine style. The exhibit is on view through the summer.
Silveira at Kramoris
The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor is presenting a show of Jorge Silveira’s found-object art through June 30. Mr. Silveira fashions old wooden objects, acrylic paint, and pieces of found rusty metal into eccentric characters. According to the artist, “I really like expressing my creativity by finding discarded objects from the forest and the ocean and turning them into raw and abstract characters or scenes.”
He is from Uruguay, where many poor people repair and reuse old cars and refrigerators many times over. Coming from that culture, he has said, he finds the things that people toss out here fascinating and enjoys using them in his art.
RVS Looks at Desire
RVS Fine Art in Southampton will show work by Jeff Muhs in the show “The Color of Desire,” beginning tomorrow with a reception Saturday night from 6 to 8. The new oil paintings represent a softer approach to the artist’s more chromatic paintings. In them he looks again at the still-life genre and breaks down the interrelationships of forms.
The Southampton native’s techniques and aesthetics are derived from his training at the School of Visual Arts and from a close study of art history. He has also integrated into his work the environment of the South Fork, including its light. He is a sculptor, too, and recently developed a furniture collection that is being shown in Manhattan and Milan.
“The Color of Desire” will run through June 30.
Soffer’s Abstraction
Sasson Soffer, who was born in Iraq but was a longtime East Hampton resident until his death in 2009, will have work in a solo exhibit to inaugurate the new Tachi Gallery on Washington Street in TriBeCa. The gallery and show will open today.
“The Abstract Experience” will be the first of several shows dedicated to Soffer’s work and will remain on view through Aug. 31. The artist was influenced by the European as well as the American tradition of abstract painting. He also worked in sculpture.
Born in Baghdad in 1925, he took an early interest in drawing. Because of unrest and anti-Semitism in the region, he fled to Iran and then, by the 1950s, to this country, where he studied at Brooklyn College under Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, and Mark Rothko. Rothko became a friend and mentor to the artist and a supporter throughout his career. Stella Sands, Soffer’s widow and a novelist, still lives in the couple’s East Hampton house and in New York City.
Giles at Delaney Cooke
Beth Giles will be the featured artist in an exhibit opening at the Delaney Cooke Gallery in Sag Harbor tomorrow with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The show is titled “Paper, Paper” and will include handmade paper works in two and three dimensions. The pieces have a circular focus, including circular books with pigmented and textural pages that can be turned for an interactive experience of the work.
The artist is a printmaker as well, and has a studio on North Haven. She was the director of the Avram Gallery at Southampton College and taught undergraduate and graduate classes in printmaking, papermaking, drawing, and art history for almost 20 years. She now teaches at Suffolk Community College.
Steven Corsano at Boltax
Steven Corsano, a painter from Springs, will have a new show at the Boltax Gallery on Shelter Island. Opening tomorrow, the show, “Start With a Faucet,” is a series of abstract mixed-media works on paper. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. at which Mr. Corsano’s first film, “Giddy-Up Lunchbox,” will be shown. The exhibit will be on view through July 4.
From Sag Harbor to Milan
In addition to an opening of Ben Fenske’s work on Saturday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., the Grenning Gallery announced this week that Ramiro, one of the artists it represents, and who divides his time between Sag Harbor and Italy, is having a retrospective in Milan on view until July 2.
The show, “Ramiro: Reality of Two Worlds,” is presented by Fondazione Stelline. The artist is a native of Venezuela who paints in a classical style, striving for images that connect the viewer to the beauty, balance, and truth that can be found by looking closely at nature.
Many of the works will travel to Sag Harbor for a solo show later this summer at the Grenning Gallery. The Web link for the show in Milan is stelline.it.
Models by Gary Lawrance
The Southampton Historical Museum is showing “Phenomenal Places: Architectural Models by Gary Lawrance” through Sept. 3. Mr. Lawrance’s firm, Lawrance Architectural Presentations, provides models and development services to architects, landscape architects, and interior designers. He will exhibit a dozen scale models of houses, including many designed by prominent South Fork architects, Francis Fleetwood, Peter Cook, Preston Philips, Kitty McCoy, and Frank Greenwald among them.
Mr. Lawrance is the co-author of “Houses of the Hamptons, 1880-1930” and writes two blogs, Houses of the Hamptons and Mansions of the Gilded Age.
Schaffner’s Photos
At Canio’s
Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor will present “Temple and Sky: Images of Korea,” a photo exhibit by Val Schaffner. Mr. Schaffner and his wife, Min-Myn, were owners of the Nabi Gallery in Sag Harbor from 1996 to 2002 and in New York City from 2003 until this year. He is the author of three books of fiction and essays.
The photos are from years of visiting his wife’s family in South Korea. He finds the country “an enchanting and paradoxical land, at once surpassingly ancient and cutting-edge modern, with a tragic history, a proud culture, and the most Internet connectivity anywhere.”
On Saturday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. the store will host a reception for the artist. The show will be on view through July 18.
Reichart Curates
Design in N.Y.C.
The Center Gallery at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus has a design show organized by Lindsay Reichart of East Hampton and Abby Goldstein through Aug. 15. The exhibit, “Benchmarks: Seven Women in Design, New York,” includes the work of Louise Fili, Carin Goldberg, Paula Scher, Gail Anderson, Eileen Boxer, Elaine Lustig Cohen, and Lucille Tenazas.
The featured work exemplifies a pivotal point in the direction or approach to design practice by the women, each of whom has made significant contributions to graphic design.
Keefe at Demato
The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will present work by Christine Keefe starting Saturday. The exhibit is called “Walking Into” and represents the artist’s encounters with psychoanalysis.
Ms. Keefe said she looks “for images that represent a range of emotions, like love and loneliness, envy, passion or fear, uncertainty, and bravery. Most often I decide to reproduce an image on canvas without considering whether or not I am able to paint it.” The resulting paintings are fragmentary or vaguely abstracted.
The show will open officially with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, but the work can be seen today.
Open Studios This Weekend
Jim Gingerich, Brian O’Leary, and Walter Us will open their studios to the public on Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m.
Mr. Gingerich, who paints landscapes and figures in oil on canvas in a frank, realist style, has a studio at 48 Foster Avenue, off Butter Lane, in Bridgehampton.
Mr. O’Leary paints abstracted works that are somewhat organically inspired yet devoid of color. His studio is at 1 McGrath’s Stand Lane, off Noyac Road at the intersection of Brick Kiln and Stoney Hill Roads in Noyac.
Mr. Us, who is from Austria, paints South Fork landscapes in what he calls an “American style” distilled from Hudson River School tendencies. His studio is at 14 Rolling Hill Court East in Sag Harbor off Brick Kiln Road and Highview Drive.
“Super Nature”
In Southampton
“Super Nature,” a group show of work by three young women artists, will open today at the 4 N. Main Gallery in Southampton. The show, which has been organized by Carole Reed, will have a reception on Saturday night from 6 to 8.
It features work by Meghan Boody, Melinda Hackett, and Kathryn Lynch, each of whom has a connection to the South Fork. The three artists are friends and each is inspired by nature. Ms. Boody uses digital photography to communicate her symbolic approach to the wild nature of the human psyche. Ms. Hackett’s paintings employ symbolism in examining the natural world through lively unicellular beings. Ms. Lynch explores water, wind, and sky in paintings inspired by both the real and the imagined. The show will be on view through Tuesday.