A Beautiful Visual Feast
The Drawing Room and its partners, Emily Goldstein and Victoria Munroe, celebrate a decade in East Hampton with a surprisingly cohesive salon-style show in its always pleasant but somewhat small gallery space.
There are more than 100 works by 37 artists packed into the exhibition, but it never feels crowded or clunky. There are weaker moments in the downstairs rooms, but only because the upstairs is so bracingly good. These are artists with long associations with the gallery as well as more recent friends. It is nice to see some of the Drawing Room’s classic archival pieces, which never get old or tired, mixed in with the new.
For this show, the gallery truly feels like a classic salon, with artwork everywhere and maps to make out the individual works by artists. Among them are John Alexander, Stephen Antonakos, Polly Apfelbaum, Antonio Asis, Alice Aycock, Jennifer Bartlett, Mary Ellen Bartley, Adam Bartos, Robert Dash, Linda Etcoff, Caio Fonseca, Carol Gove, Robert Harms, Sue Heatley, Loekie Heintzberger, Christopher Hewat, Christine Hiebert, Chuck Holtzman, Sharon Horvath, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Laurie Lambrecht, Rex Lau, Vincent Longo, Diane Mayo, Olivia Munroe, Adrian Nivola, Jean Pagliuso, Dan Rizzie, Clifford Ross, Toni Ross, Rolph Scarlett, Raja Ram Sharma, James Siena, Donald Sultan, Jane Wilson, and Jack Youngerman.
The gallery regularly turns the front room into a delightful focal point for its exhibitions. Although it always presents the new and familiar in ways that are fresh and lively, here, the staff had a particular challenge: taking the eclectic collection and placing the works in ways that make visual sense. What developed is fascinating and educational as well as visually satisfying, and even quite beautiful.
The 10 years have proven the Drawing Room to be remarkably consistent in terms of its aesthetics, even if the works span centuries. The historical works are mixed liberally with the contemporary ones, and it is in these groupings that their geometric purity and classicizing tendencies emerge. But not all is precise and rigid, many other works are idiosyncratic and fantastical, and their fluidity softens the harder edges.
On one wall, Ms. Aycock’s fanciful “Project for a Fountain” drawings are paired with 19th-century drawings of industrial designs for floorboards, roof trusses, gardens, a utopian dome, a candelabra, and even a tongue-in-cheek set of four drawings of a proposed perch for a parrot. Added into the mix are Mr. Holtzman’s mechanically inspired drawings, Ms. Hiebert’s drawings made in and from nature, and Mr. Nivola’s wire sculpture, which contribute a similar sense of folly. Grounding it all is a drawing of a Greek temple facade made by Theodore Olivier in 1840, looking sober and massive.
On an opposite wall, Ms. Apfelbaum’s “Empress Twist 11,” a colorful and complicated woodblock monoprint is placed with Mr. Antonakos’s drafts for neon light projects, Mr. Asis’s blocky geometric gouaches, and Mr. Lau’s free-form linear explorations of similar geometric shapes in oil on wood.
A long table holds ceramics by Ms. Mayo, brass sculptures by Mr. Hewat that are often inspired by Scrabble, and Mr. Kendrick’s very “Blue Crate,” a tabletop version of something the sculptor is known for making on a much more massive scale. Here, its size does not diminish its power or dominance.
One favorite passage in the show happens in the wall between the upstairs galleries. There, a 19th-century watercolor drawing of a pear is placed with a Bartos photograph of an artist’s studio, and Mr. Sultan’s drawing of a dead bird, clearly spelled out for the viewer in handwriting as well, just to be sure there was no misunderstanding that the bird might just be sleeping. The vignette is a perfect mediation of still life and all that it can mean and has meant historically. It’s one of the few groupings that is hung in the Drawing Room’s more traditionally airy style, unstacked with a decent amount of eyewash between works, and it is very striking.
A wall on the back gallery that takes up the theme of water mixes a small Wilson drawing with miniature photographs from Mr. Ross, and drawings by Ms. Horvath, Mr. Dash, and Mr. Sharma. Mr. Ross’s photographs of trees printed on wood veneer on a neighboring wall add to the joy of discovery and rediscovery here.
We could go on like this throughout the gallery, but it would take up too much space and time. The real accomplishment here is visual and that should be seen to be experienced and to make one’s own discoveries. The show is on view through the end of February