Big-Small Holiday Show

It is the time of year when galleries often scale their offerings down, not to include less, but to show more, albeit smaller, works at friendlier price points for gift giving. As much as the art world plays by different rules, size does matter, at least when determining value.

Each gallery approaches this in its own way, offering “gems” in the case of Grenning Gallery, or “invitationals” like Romany Kramoris, or a “salon” like Drawing Room. It gives the galleries a chance to highlight the full depth of their rosters and make art purchasing affordable in a way that happens more regularly in season with fund-raisers and benefits, but not as much in the winter. It is difficult to get one’s arms around these exhibitions. With no uniting theme, you’re often lucky to find even a few vignettes that work together on the walls.

Ille Arts in Amagansett has done a respectable job this year with its holiday show. The artists include a mix of East End standard bearers with some participants from Brooklyn and beyond. The prices are on each work, so no mystery there, either. It is rather less distracting to have it there, a feeling of, “glad that consideration is out of the way, let’s now ponder the art.”

I was taken with quite a bit of work here. There was something about Amanda Brown’s “Rooftop” charcoal drawing that reminded me of early 20th-century artists making sojourns to New Mexico to paint the mountains and the adobe structures.

Matt Vega’s “Aleatory” is also a color­ful addition with a hint of early Mondrian thrown into what otherwise appears to be a reflection on pixels. It’s matched rather nicely with Tracy Harris’s “Avenir,” an encaustic and oil painting. Mark Perry’s “Rabbit” and Arlene Slavin’s “Intersections G” are rather striking. Elaine Grove and Ty Stroudsburg are paired together well: offering color-saturated landscapes that vary only slightly in their degree of abstraction.

John Haubrich’s “Pop” from 2012 is a surprisingly appealing paean to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” but in a more handmade, painterly way. Linda Miller’s black-paper nesting bowls at first glance seem severe and minimal, but their delicacy and the evidence of the artist’s hands make them more intimate and approachable.

Most works are current and show what might be new directions for an artist, but there are exceptions. Monica Banks has an older wire sculpture in the show, dating from 2005. Matthew Bliss has some moody mixed-media watercolors he made in 2003.

There is a dynamic use of the photographic medium on display. Cyanotype, stacked images, and straightforward digital prints by artists such as Ellen Steinberg Coven, Joe Pintauro, Joan M. Kane, and Andrea Sher are included. Sometimes the prints are documents of other artworks or capture moments such as Christa Maiwald’s “Bouquet (Cake),” which shows a frosted layer cake festooned with seeds in a target pattern on a bed of intensely colored autumn leaves with a few purple blooms adding further pops of hue. It is very striking. For old school platinum prints, it is hard to beat Kochiro Kurti’s “Rock and Reed” a moody, meditative image merging land, water, and sky in almost sepia tones that look like drawing.

There is much more to see and explore in the show and even take home if the impulse strikes and the wallet agrees. It will be on view through Jan. 3.