Author: Sarah Sargent

Existence rather than likeness is the focus of “Protagonist,” on view at Chroma Projects Art Laboratory through March 24. The show features the work of a diverse group of artists—Bolanle Adeboye, Matt Kleberg, Akemi Ohira, Sarah Owens, Carrie Miller Payne, Nym Pedersen, Sharon Shapiro, and Richard Weaver—whose images employ metaphor, allegory, and the creative application of medium to communicate the human figure.

(Courtesy the artist)

I appreciate the enigmatic world Akemi Ohira describes, using self-portraiture and imaginative iconography to convey her personal experience. Her choices (lava lamps and balloon animals) are funny and poignant. Ohira is a printmaker and the care and labor involved in that medium spills over into these diminutive panels, which seem to contain so much within their tiny borders.

Matt Kleberg has been playing around with portraiture for some time, figuring out ways to keep the genre fresh and relevant. He likes to get up really close to his subject’s face, but he also employs strategies that create a layer between subject and viewer. By inverting the portrait of a man, for instance, he achieves distance. “I want there to be a veil or hindrance to keep you from fully knowing or seeing the subject,” he said. Kleberg is also the subject of a concurrent solo show at McGuffey Art Center, “Canciones de Mi Padre,” which deals with his rather interesting personal history. His family owns and works a large ranch in Texas, which has been in their possession for seven generations.

Sharon Shapiro combines portraiture with images from old magazines to create intriguing figurative hybrids. In “Pulling The Wool” the protagonist is fractured, a recurring theme in her work that suggests states of flux. Shapiro uses collage deftly to produce a wonderful Missoni-like pattern that balances her elegant drawing.

Richard Weaver’s sculptures of a man and a woman command attention. Weaver is a very talented painter and sculptor who works in a traditional manner, producing beautiful portraits that evoke Thomas Eakins. Though classically rendered, the sculptures at Chroma (that were conceived as part of a larger group) are constructed of unconventional materials (Styrofoam and steel pipes) that look like something you might find at a building site.

“Growing out of chance meetings between different materials,” Nym Pedersen’s collages, made from found material and paint, are fierce little works. Twisted faces suggest the viscera and movement of Francis Bacon, overlaid in many cases with the thick impasto of Chaim Soutine. The show encompasses at least a decade of Pedersen’s work and I like where he’s headed: the tightness of the earlier pieces, is giving way to a freer, looser approach in such later works as “Qaddafi’s Last Stand,” and “Colors.” Art is a joyful enterprise for Pedersen, who like Picasso embraces his inner child: “The whole point of making art for me is internal peace and happiness,” he said.

Sarah Owens’ ethereal and poetic work is well suited for the dramatic setting of Chroma’s “black box,” where the lighting is subdued and the walls seem to echo the complex surfaces she creates. Using a mostly monochromatic palette, Owens offers a rich visual feast. For the framework of a couple of the paintings, she uses oval serving trays, applying plaster onto them. It’s a clever choice, as the trays’ lips provide a built-in frame. I particularly liked “Oval Tray 1,” which featured a Nefertiti lookalike and “Submerged Figure,” which boasted a gorgeous surface.

A late addition to Chroma’s lineup, Isaac Levenbrown’s mini-show entitled “The Waiting Room” is a discourse on mortality. The work features searing images of children, who despite being victimized by famine, disease, or violence still maintain their dignity. With their electric colors and large scale, the work is powerful. Levenbrown has been battling cancer and in his many hours spent in hospital waiting rooms has turned his attention to “the essential elements of humanity: life and death, love and courage; the big picture issues faced by every little person on the planet.”—Sarah Sargent

The UVA Art Museum unveiled four new shows earlier this month that cover a breathtaking expanse of ground and make for an enjoyable afternoon of fine art. Curated by Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor of Italian Renaissance Art and Literature, “Master Printmakers: The Italian Renaissance and its Modern Legacy” features engravings, woodcuts, and etchings by artists who made prints from the work of Renaissance masters like Raphael, Tintoretto, and Titian. 

As the show points out, these printmakers were not only artists in their own right, but also, “graphic historians who keep alive the inventions [and artistic vision] of major artists of earlier periods.” It’s a pretty esoteric show, with many of the prints dating from the 16th century; others are later, including a Clara Walther after Titian’s "Man with the Blue Sleeve.” I know the original painting well, and Walther’s monochromatic, graphic rendering of the heavy, intricately stitched silk of the sleeve is truly marvelous.

“The Inferno” by a Florentine engraver after “The Master of The Triumph of Death” presents one of those visions of hell, which allowed the artist to go wild imagining all the outlandish things devilish imps could do to torture the unfortunates who end up in their clutches. There are three versions after Titian’s “The Death of St. Peter, Martyr” one from the 16th, one from the 18th and one from the 19th century.

It’s interesting to compare these and see the shift in style from a rather doctrinaire accounting of the scene to a distinctly darker and more romantic aesthetic. “The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence” by Cornelis Cort after Titian, a bold nocturnal scene full of smoke, clouds, fire, and movement is a tour de force of the printmaker’s technique. My one quibble with the show is its title: Aside from Walther, who qualifies only in terms of date, I couldn’t detect anything having to do with a “modern legacy.” “100 Years of Photography,” assembled by Matthew Affron (the museum’s curator of modern art and its academic curator) features a century of photography beginning with the daguerreotypes and tintypes of its infancy in the 1850s. The show features portraiture, urban scenes, landscape, social documentary, and art photography by artists like Nadar, Stieglitz, Frederick Henry Evans, and Edward Steichen, among others.* I find these early artifacts of long ago realities haunting, and was drawn especially to Gertrude Staton Käsebier’s “Happy Days” from 1903, which presents an idyllic scene of children, kept from being sentimental through its strong composition and un-posed quality.  

“Curator’s Choice: People, Places, and Things” put together by Jennifer Farrell, the museum’s curator of exhibitions, focuses, as its title implies, on works rooted in reality. I am generally not a fan of thematic shows, because the theme tends to take over the objects. Here, for instance, artworks are hung according to category—people, places, things —as opposed to how they look next to one another. Nevertheless, the show is an appropriate one for UVA, given that its collection is heavily weighted in representational art and the theme provides a clever way for the museum to employ it. 

Photography is well represented here. There are two Sally Manns, a Virginia landscape and the iconic “Jessie Bites,” which showcase Mann’s mastery of her medium and subject, and the terrific large-format, “Marina’s Room” by Tina Barney, that modern-day Goya, who packs her lush images of the well-heeled with so much psychological and sociological information. New to me, is Paul Thek. His paint and pastel “3 Prunes” was a standout, even overshadowing the Picasso (to which it owes its existence) nearby. There is a charming oil interior by Alex Katz that conveys perfectly a gritty New York tenement, a delightful Larry Rivers mixed media collage called “Dutch Masters,” and an exceedingly sympathetic portrait of Robert Gwathmey by Moses Soyer rendered with dynamic brush work and lovely shades of blue, green and beige. A remarkable Franz Kline drawing of a man has a delicacy that seems so at odds with the great scrawling gestures of his later work. **

The fourth new exhibition is perhaps the most intimate. “Tom Burckhardt: Paintings” features, in addition to paintings, a simply wonderful easel sculpture complete with paints, brushes, and canvas made entirely out of cardboard. It is a tantalizing taste of what is to come: Burckhardt is the 2011-12 UVA Arts Board’s artist in residence and is working with students on an artistic interpretation of the natural history museum that once existed in UVA’s Brooks Hall, using more cardboard. Burckhardt likes working in non-precious materials, which have an informality he finds appealing. He also likes unexpected pairings and for his paintings uses traditional oil paint on unconventional cast plastic supports. 

Burckhardt’s work may be small, but there’s a lot going on. His paintings are both abstract and representational. They resemble collages thanks to their textural surfaces and the layered effect of the compositions. Burckhardt makes interesting color choices and arresting juxtapositions of shapes and patterns. There is whimsy in the work (he embellishes his paintings with trompe l’oeil tacks on the edges of the “canvases”), but it’s tempered, for the most part, by a handmade roughness and many underlying interesting ideas. I loved “Bad Mustard” (Burckhardt’s titles are great), but he’s a little too fond of “pareidolia” (the phenomenon where a person sees a recognizable image within an inanimate object). In several compositions the shapes seem to organize themselves into faces, which I found both unsettling and gimmicky. 

You don’t quite know where you stand with Burckhardt’s work. It looks contemporary, but has a palette, texture, and form that evokes the past. This ambiguity is intentional; Burckhardt uses technique and his various visual gambits to achieve what he calls a “slowed down look. I want to gently pull the rug out from under the viewer,” catching him unawares and thus engendering a deeper engagement with the work.

At UVA Art Museum: “Master Printmakers: The Italian Renaissance and Its Modern Legacy” and “Curator’s Choice: People, Places, and Things” both through May 20, “100 Years of Photography” through May 13 and “Tom Burckhardt: Paintings” through June 3.

*Clarification: The photography exhibition will cycle through the works of different artists. An earlier version of this story mentioned that the current who would include works from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Atget, but their work is not currently on display.

**Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed an opinion about non-representational art to the exhibit’s wall display.