Seeing Red, Part 3: A Few Paintings

.Seeing Red, Part 1: The Play

Seeing Red, Part 2: The Dress

While the play and the dress are in performance, several red paintings, all in exhibition in New York City, are quietly interacting with viewers one person at a time. Specifics are in the caption below each image, so here—as a totally unintentional post script to the current Marketing Mondays post on Ageism— let me let me just say that these paintings were created by people whose painting chops have been developed over time.
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Suzan Frecon, Embodiment of Red (Soforouge), 2009, oil on linen, two panels: 108 x 87.5 x 1.5 inches
At the Whitney Biennial through May 30
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Two rounded forms, one in each panel, seem to rise or sink—or perhaps breathe, rising and falling—in this painting. Frecon has been at it for “more than four decades,” according to the museum’s website. Frecon’s painting (there’s a second one of hers as well) is on view in the big gallery to the left of the elevator on the fourth floor. The painting appears courtesy of the David Zwirner Gallery, which Frecon recently joined.

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Tad Wiley, Counterpane, oil-based enamel on wood panel, 74 x 56 inches
At the Heidi Cho Gallery through May 22

Wiley, who according to his website arrived in New York in 1982, specializes in large repeating forms that float through the picture plane. Sometimes geometric, sometimes more organic, they reference architecture and landscape in more or less equal measure. From a distance you'll fall into these paintings; from up close you'll see the painterly subtleties within the forms.

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Sohan Qadri, title unknown
At Sundaram Tagore through May 8

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Qadri is described by his gallery as a “tantric painter,” whose works—painted in ink and dye on paper, embody the great opposite themes of yin and yang. I'm struck by the textile-like maeriality of Qadri's work, and by another compelling opposite: the richness of his reductiveness. He was born in Punjab, India, in 1932.

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Detail below

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Eric Holzman, Grove II, 1993-2010, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches
At Lohin Geduld, ended April 24

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In Canopy, a lovely exhibition organized around the image and theme of trees, this gem of a painting radiated almost off the wall. My heart beat a little faster when I saw it. The artist was born in New York City in 1949, though if this painting is any indication, it could have been Siena in 1349.
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Richard Anuskiewicz, Formal, 1968, acrylic on masonite, 36 x 36 inches
At D. Wigmore Fine Art through July 9
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Born in 1930, Anuskiewicz is the granddaddy of the group, though his heyday was the Sixties, when he was under 40. Still, the work says something about "aging." The seven paintings in this show are as visually fresh, physically pristine and optically compelling as the day the paint was dry to the touch.

This and six other Anuskiewicz paintings are in the Wigmore exhibition, Op Out of Ohio, which includes the work of Julian Stanczak and The Anonima Group (Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski). If you’re interested in geometric abstraction with an optical bent, get your retinas over to see this show in midtown.
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