Announcing Paul Shakespear: Corrientes at Howard Yezerski Gallery

Paul Shakespear: Corrientes opens tonight! Check out the press release below.

Press Release:

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present new work by Paul Shakespear. The paintings are a powerful compression of emotion, memory, and visual delight. The title of the show, Corrientes, references the slow change of shifting trends, a half-lit address in Buenos Aires out of a song, the watery depth of ocean currents. 

Paul Shakespear, Cove, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26" x 60 1/4", Photo: Will Howcroft

 The paintings are slow - they demand contemplation. Upwards of thirty glazes of acrylic are brushed, troweled, and rubbed on. The hours that Shakespear puts into the work are compressed into those layers and layers of thin glazes, their distinct features emerging slowly as you let them. 

Paul Shakespear, Seville, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 65", Photo: Will Howcroft

 Shakespear is hesitant to reference influences from life - the paintings are evocations of something deeper than changes on the surface. Not unlike deep sea currents, unseeable and untouchable, but essential to the planet as inner thoughts are to our being. Also like the sea, the surfaces are alluring, a glossy window onto the world within. The gloss is a byproduct of the process, of the subtlety of the layers built up. With each layer the colors are richer and richer - building a visual conversation underneath the sheen. Be careful of this gloss - look too fast and you'll miss the space within it. 

Paul Shakespear, Pitfall, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 66" x 36", Photo: Will Howcroft

The paintings are objects that don't sit exactly on the wall - they swell with light and float off in one direction or another. Multiple panels build off of one another - tension fills the space between them. Colors within hum with tension and resonance. The result is otherworldly in the sense that they are solid but made up of the intangible, the ghostly, the not quite knowable; Shakespear looks to capture the stuff of that ethereal realm that lives beside us and within us.

On view April 20 - May 22, 2012

Review of 'Echo' in the Boston Globe

Vitality and Strength 
By: Cate McQuaid

John Goodman's grainy, black-and-white photographs at Howard Yezerski Gallery emphasize motion and form. They convey a masculine sensibility, and a melancholy one; they celebrate vitality and strength, and grieve its short stay. The show, organized by curator Bonnell Robinson, visits several bodies of work, including photos of a Times Square boxing gym, Boston Ballet dancers, people in the streets of Havana, and more.

"Carousel/Tulsa" depicts a rodeo horse rearing behind a gate, mane flying. Goodman shot it at an angle; the people in the distant stands slide past the horse on a diagonal, ramping up the animal's height and urgency. You can see that same athletic force in the boxer gleaming with sweat in "Anthony Greene," all muscle and grit as he tapes his hands. Lights stream in from the doorway behind him, like those on a passing freight train.

A similar, more delicate rush appears in "Dominos/Havana Cuba." Goodman shot it from above, focusing on the worn game board, the dominoes reflecting in the sun. As in "Carousel/Tulsa," he angles the frame to give the shot spin. The players' hands blur as the pass over the pieces. Even the crisper photos seem to propel forward. "Father's Day/Coney Island" depicts a canoodling couple on the beach; they roll off center, toward the edge of the frame: passion at its height, and on the way out.

John Goodman: Echo

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present Echo, a solo exhibition of Boston-based photographer John Goodman, from February 10 - March 13, 2012. The exhibition is selected from photographs representing more than three decades of Goodman’s work and is curated by Bonnell Robinson.

Along with selections from his acclaimed book on boxing, The Times Square Gym, and his well known portfolios of Havana and the Boston Ballet, there are images never before exhibited from travels in Cuba, Italy and the USA.

A constant in all Goodman’s work is his connection to people and his ability to photograph them during the moments when they are most revealed. He captures the boxer lost in thought, the ballet dancer preparing for her moment onstage, a gospel singer in song, the couple who have playfully shed their clothes on a summer day to pose for his camera.

Goodman's world is one in which oppositions become dualities-one can’t exist without the other. We see it in his choice of subject matter:

“I am drawn to the body and its contradictions. I explore the contest between light and dark, male and female, grit and tenderness youth and age, power and grace.”

Goodman’s characteristic syntax and atmosphere draw us inside events we might ordinarily overlook. Blur, grain, softened edges are protagonists in Goodman’s work suggesting the very act of perception. Nothing can be captured with entire clarity because life itself escapes the confines of the frame.

Like the photographer, the subjects of Goodman’s world are in constant motion: people sing, dance, fight, gamble, and cut loose. And the moment passes. Even lovers on a beach, enjoying an intimate stillness, disappear by the final image.

The bittersweet qualities of Goodman’s work build towards his own kind of summation in this exhibition about life--and these photographs are Goodman’s tribute to living it fully.

John Goodman’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. Goodman studied with the photographer Minor White in the 1970's and is now on the faculty of the Art Institute of Boston.

Reviews of Brian Zink: Assembled

The Boston Phoenix:

Composition in 2026 Black and 3015 White, 22.5 x 20

For some time now, East Cambridge artist Brian Zink has been rummaging through the history of '60s minimalism. His last body of work was wall reliefs assembled from Band-Aid-colored plastic handrails or bumpers like the ones you see in hospitals. They're serious, striped constructions, but also faintly humorous — like sculptures Carl Andre might make if he was confined to a nursing home.

Zink's new show, "Assembled" at Howard Yezerski Gallery (460 Harrison Ave, Boston, through February 7), features handsome, hard-edged abstractions assembled from mod, jitterbugging patterns of flat Plexiglass tiles. Some diamond and triangle designs feel like details from argyle sweaters. A white square radiates black and white rays like a Japanese rising-sun flag. One pattern of wide M's and W's made from black and white parallelograms begins to suggest fences receding back into space. But mainly Zink picks designs that emphasize the flatness of the surface.

And, oooh, those surfaces: shiny Plexi tiles — mostly muted blacks, grays, and ivories — catch the light of the room as well as your reflection. The works bring to mind the '50s California hard-edged paintings of Lorser Feitelson or Karl Benjamin, op art, the high gloss of fetish-finish art, and that line from the 1967 film The Graduate about the future being "plastics." They're buoyant, but also hermetic. It's not the sort of abstraction in which you dive into paint that's been whipped up into moody outbursts. It's about cool, sleek design and staying on the synthetic plastic surface. This literal shallowness is both tantalizing and alienating. Like Frank Stella said of his own flat, geometric paintings in 1966: "What you see is what you see."

- Text by Greg Cook, January 10, 2012

The Boston Globe:

Composition in 2026 Black, 3015 White and 2308 Turquoise, 32.5 x 30

Synapses firing

Brian Zink is a minimalist with pizazz. His show, “Assembled,’’ at Howard Yezerski Gallery, is deceptively straightforward and clean: Using Plexiglas, he lays out geometric patterns on panels. They buzz and pop and shift. They’re not paintings, but they explore one of painting’s conceptual edges, between object and picture.

We interact with the object on a physical level: It’s a boxy panel that protrudes a bit from the wall, with a shiny surface. The picture engages the imagination: Is it just a pattern? Does it depict space? “Composition 2662 Red and 2026 Black’’ is a checkerboard made of trapezoids. The diagonals hint that the picture goes beyond the surface; abutting trapezoids resemble the faces of a jutting or receding cube.

Zink makes several works using the same pattern with different colors. A zigzag of turquoise and black rhomboids over white looks as if it’s floating; the same zigzag of white and green over black looks flatter, grounded. There’s a wonderful clarity to these pieces. Looking at them enables us to witness our synapses firing, as we leap conceptually between space and surface.

- Text by Cate McQuaid, January 18, 2012

Brian Zink: Assembled

Brian Zink: Assembled

January 6 - February 7, 2012

Opening Reception: Friday January 6^th, 6-8pm

Press Release:

"Every form is a base for colour; every colour is the attribute of a form."

-       -Victor Vasarely

With Assembled, Brian Zink returns to his well-known colored Plexiglas construction practice.  Zink’s new work, however, extends that language into a critical consideration of the symbiotic and uncanny relationship between pure abstraction and pictorial space.

For Zink, the real springs from the sheer presence of the material object – and, as the show’s title and an initial inspection make clear, the works are Assembled from machine-manufactured parts. Each work is constructed of a thick flat plastic slab supporting a careful arrangement of glossy, commercially-colored, chunky Plexiglas diamonds and rhombi.  The compositions appear regular: a simple, direct pattern sustained by a single hue balanced against black, white, and/or gray.   In fact each comprises a symmetrical design that suggests an infinite repetition, the base repeat of an endless pattern.  Like other Zink constructions, we’re rooted by their materiality, simplicity, and patterning to a consideration of the real space we occupy with them.

But this rootedness gradually unfolds into another, uncanny experience of space.  The sharp diagonals and strident horizontals and verticals of Zink’s designs assemble strange, shallow pictorial spaces for us to consider.  Coinciding with each other and the edges of their patterned parameters, Zink’s shapes become floating planes, tilted doorways, bottomless windows, sharply lit blocks – almost, for they inevitably bump into or crash against the geometric purity, materiality, and exterior realness of the object.  

The resulting experience keeps us hopping uncomfortably between the two familiar comfort zones of abstraction – the interior real, or pictorial space, and the exterior real, or object space. Each challenges and undermines the other; a pattern of diagonals slides awkwardly into a dramatically elongated arcade; architectural blocks reform into a non-hierarchical series of trapezoids.  But the works never reduce to an op-art curiosity of abstraction: Zink doesn’t let his shapes and colors become unreal, brute facts, but keeps them peering into our world, our architecture, our space.  As Vasarely suggests, the natural coincidence of color and form lie at the heart of experience itself.  Brian Zink’s new work invites us into this heart, into his immense sensitivity to the life of form.

Review of Hannah Barrett: Family Jewels in the Boston Globe

From the Boston Globe, Wednesday December 14th, 2011

Text by Cate McQuaid

Gender Bending

Hannah Barrett's paintings and drawings in "Family Jewels" at Howard Yezerski Gallery are comical and deadly serious. Barrett has for years made portraits of fictional characters of blended genders.  The first I saw were mash-ups of her parents. For the newest ones, she tosses together Adolf Hitler and Queen Elizabeth II--two very different icons of power in the 20^th century.

This show is all about connotations of power. Each piece begins as a collage, and evolves into a drawing, then a painting. The subjects are the same DNA, but they all look quite different, as Barrett shuffles facial features and elements of physique and costume. For the backgrounds, she borrows from Tintoretto and John Constable, not to mention Hitler's own watercolors. In almost all the works, Barrett unveils the hermaphroditic subjects' genitalia amid the jodhpurs, uniforms and gowns.

"Joyous Entry" depicts a figure executing a demure royal wave, with petite hands in creamy gloves. The figure, on horseback (and with an open fly), wears Hitler's uniform shirt and sports his mustache, but also has donned glittering rubies. The brown hair is cropped short, but bracketed by gray curls.

The funniest bit, in every work, is the face. These characters look awkward, distorted, and prim, yet they are always somehow trying.

"Fidei Defensor" shows a largely masculine character, with Hitler's nose and mustache over a broad neck, draped in fur. The chest is bare and muscular, yet there are breasts and the genitals pop out of a white skirt. In the background, Barrett has painted a glacier from a Hitler painting. One of Queen Elizabeth's Faberge eggs perches on the desk in the background.

It's charmed imagery. Simply to expose a royal's genitals has an emperor's-new-clothes vibe. It nakedly acknowledges the historic emphasis on a monarch's fertility too. In making these figures androgynous, Barrett also elevates to high rank people born that way, who hide, pass, or surgically alter what nature gave them. Her subjects are floridly both male and female, affirming of all possibilities. 

Paul Heroux: Vessels

Paul Heroux

Vessels

December 2 - December 30, 2011

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present a small exhibition of ceramics by artist Paul Heroux. Using a combination of slab and coil building techniques, Heroux creates sleek, elegant ceramic vessels, which come alive with their painterly surfaces. Trained as a painter, Heroux approaches his stoneware pieces as a three dimensional canvas. Combining a mixture of figurative and non-figurative imagery with matte and shiny glazes, Heroux builds up the surfaces of his vessels to create tactile and dynamic works. Drawing loosely from nature as inspiration for the forms of the vessels and their glazing, each piece takes on an organic quality of its own. The durability and functionality of the work is also apparent; they are weighty and useful while simultaneously delicate and beautiful.

Paul Heroux lives and works in Maine and has shown throughout New England and New York and is in public collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA, and the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.