Shows seen, not seen, and to be seen

Catskill Ledge - oil on panel by Tom Nelson

Is mid-March too late to be looking back at 2018? Well, probably, but I'm going to do it anyway.

I'm plagued by the many missed opportunities of the past year, which featured a vast array of worthy, challenging, and screwed-up art exhibitions in our region, and which I wish I had been able to see more of and write more about. So here's a bit of a recap; maybe it'll make up just a little for what didn't happen quite enough here on Get Visual during 2018.

Shows seen

Toward the end of 2018, I caught a few really strong shows in venues that don't necessarily get a lot of publicity around here. One of those was a rare treat in the form of a large collection of paintings by Tom Nelson at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, entitled From NY to LA: Landscapes of the Hudson Valley and California Desert. Nelson, who has worked full-time as an exhibit designer at the Albany Institute of History & Art for decades, has quietly maintained a strong art practice but hardly ever shows his work. This compendium of around 60 paintings and oil sketches delighted his many fans and reminded us that he is still one of the best landscape painters anywhere.

Ascent - digital photograph by George J Nicholson

Also in Troy, a fine exhibition of color photographs by George J Nicholson was hosted by the PhotoCenter, marking an impressive debut by a late-blooming artist making up for lost time. The 30-plus images in Taos Journey were all made in what Nicholson describes as "a seven-day reverie" in the high desert of New Mexico, in which he was inspired to abandon his original plan to shoot panoramic landscapes in favor of much more intimate images, all of them square. It worked. He will be one to watch.

I made an excursion to Saratoga Springs, where I checked out another intriguing photo project, this one by Jessica Mansmith, who received a Community Arts Grant to produce a body of work within the confines of a mysterious former military base called Norad Z-50. The resulting pictures, which were shown in the Saratoga Springs Train Station, are both haunting and colorfully lyrical.

Saratoga is also the home of Harrison Lobdell Gallery, which is co-owned and filled with paintings by Zack Lobdell, so I stopped there as well (for my first time) and took in the display of Lobdell's powerful abstract expressions, along with the super-high-tech furniture designs of his partner, Peter Harrison. It's a great space and Zack was a good host, making it well worth the visit.

Shows not seen

92,955,807.273mi. - lithograph by Kathryn Polk 

You know the song about regrets, and I definitely have a few about shows I missed in 2018. Top of the list is a six-person exhibition of contemporary printmakers at Skidmore College's Schick Art Gallery entitled Pressed. We have too few opportunities to see fine etchings, lithographs, etc., by current artists and I was really sad to miss this one. Speaking of printmaking, I was also dismayed to have missed the 2018 edition of the Screen Print Biennial at Sage College's Opalka Gallery - but at least there will be another one in two years - maybe I'll be less busy then.

Another deep regret is having failed to visit a two-exhibition display of work by Rockwell Kent at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls - one of paintings and one of prints (yet more prints!). Kent is a longtime favorite of mine, and shows like this don't come along every year. Among other great museum shows, I also wish I hadn't missed Women Artists in Paris 1850-1900 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown - but I hear there's a Berthe Morisot show on tour, currently at the Dallas Museum of Art, so there's always a chance to see the best artist from the Clark show there (or later this year in Paris - now, there's an idea!).

Rush - acrylic on linen on panel by Jenny Kemp

I was also sorry not to see what must have been a beautiful exhibition at Union College's Mandeville Gallery entitled Slow Grow of 18 recent paintings by Jenny Kemp, as she has been one of my favorite regional artists over the last several years. Meanwhile, at another first-rate college gallery, I missed three sculptors making a re-appearance at The College of Saint Rose to celebrate 10 years of the school's Esther Massry Gallery. And, at yet another outstanding academic venue, I managed to lose track of the UAlbany Art Museum's show entitled Younger Than Today: Photographs of Children (and sometimes their mothers) by Andy Warhol. The title alone recommended that one. Alas!

Shows to be seen

But all is not lost! There are some great shows out there that I (and you!) can still catch before they end. Here are a few examples:

Landmark at Albany International Airport Gallery through March 25. A ten-person show created in partnership with the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, this features contest-winning essays and poems along with the visual art.

Brian Cirmo: paintings at the Lake George Arts Project's Courthouse Gallery in Lake George Village through April 13. Another favorite local painter, at a favorite venue (and it's warm enough now to go up there without fear).

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City through April 23. Some critics are saying that this middle-aged Swedish woman invented abstract painting before all the famous boys, beginning in 1906 out of spiritualistic inspiration, and now rescued from obscurity to be called "beyond great" on ArtNet.com. I'm going to New York to see this unique show. Really!

The Sisters - oil on canvas by Berthe Morisot

Feibes and Schmitt collection going to Hyde

By now many of you know that Werner Feibes has donated about a third of the extraordinary modern and contemporary art collection he amassed with his partner Jim Schmitt to The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, as the news has been splashed all over local media (such as here by Paul Grondahl in the Times Union). The rest of the collection is promised to the Hyde as well, and Director Erin Coe rightly declares it "a transformational gift."

I'm excited for the Hyde, proud of my friend Werner, and sad for the recent loss of Jim ... but not surprised by this bequest, as I predicted it in a 2003 Metroland review, which I wrote when the Hyde mounted a superb exhibition called Form(ation) that was drawn from the Feibes and Schmitt collection. The news also brings to mind a story:

It was my good fortune sometime around 1985 to accompany Werner Feibes on a buying trip to a New York City gallery. At the time, I was a young gallery owner myself (in Albany), struggling to find customers for works by regional artists in the $300-to-$500 range. With Werner, I was exposed to quite another art world.

I don't recall the name of the gallery, but it was on the upper East Side of Manhattan and very elegant. Werner was there to see a Jean Arp relief constructed of painted wood, about 16 by 20 inches as I recall, in black and white (of course). The gallery presented it on a velvet-draped easel in a private room, where we murmured our approval and greedily eyed this vintage gem. The asking price was $15,000. Of course, Werner negotiated a discount, then coolly wrote a check for $13,500 - and, in a flash, we were on our way back up I-87 in Werner and Jim's boxy Volvo wagon (the Arp would be shipped).

I was totally speechless (think about that, you who know me personally!). I had just seen how art dealers really operated, and how sharp collectors did, too. The money that changed hands so easily was almost equal to my entire annual income (and I worked a lot of hours to earn it), but I didn't doubt that the Arp was well worth it. Neither do I doubt that it is now worth at least 15 times as much. It was a beautiful work of art and I hope to see it again some day at the Hyde.

Werner's generosity in inviting me on that trip was genuine, but this donation is beyond generous. The collection has been appraised for several million dollars; yet Werner's comment to  Grondahl was "What the hell would I do with all that money?" Good point - the true collector thinks about value in a different way than most of us. In the meantime, Werner still gets to live with the rest of the artwork, then it all goes to the Hyde upon his death. I wish him a very long life.

Ten Years: Remembering 9/11 by Marie Triller

In the inevitable push-pull between form and content that lies behind all photographic imagery, the work of Marie Triller falls squarely in the middle of the argument. But it’s a pretty big middle and, as seen in the just-published collection titled Ten Years: Remembering 9/11 ($29.95, John Isaacs Books), her work covers much of that range.

Triller, who earned an MFA at SUNY New Paltz and works as a high school art teacher, has had a quiet but persistent presence on the Capital Region art scene for decades, and for much of that time she has exhibited expertly made, digitally captured color photographs that represent human culture, often from travels to distant places such as Belize, Ireland, and the American Southwest. One might argue that these pictures were clearly documentary in purpose – and that would be true – but it is equally true that they were intended as personal artistic expression. The pictures presented in Triller’s new book are no exception to this duality.

Beginning with a full-bleed cover shot of a motorcycle gas tank embellished with an exquisite painting of a New York City skyline dominated by hovering ghosts of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the book teases the eye as much as it plucks at the heart strings. Immediately, the parameters are shown: This photographer use color, shape, composition, and point of view in ways that your everyday documentary photographers do not.

Perusing the sequences of images inside, which are organized into nine chapters of equal length, one gathers a cumulative sense of the deeper meaning behind the work. The result of 10 years’ worth of anniversary visits to the site of the WTC attacks, these 97 pictures were culled from thousands, then thoughtfully sequenced to offer Triller’s interpretation of the chapters’ themes: Memory, Security, Expression, Reflection, Community, Courage, Place, Justice, and Spirit.

Triller explains in a short opening essay to the book that she avoided the press photographers’ territory in “the pit” at Ground Zero, choosing instead to focus on “the periphery, the crowds who gather each September 11 morning, and who tell a truer story of that bright, dark day.” I think Triller would say that, through these pictures and this book, she is attempting to share that story – their story – with the rest of us.

But a photographer – an observer – cannot set himself completely aside from the story he photographs. And, so, Triller’s book is the record of her experience of that story, filtered through her eyes and her lens. What I see when I look at these pictures is a wonderfully sensitive, open set of eyes, guided by an equally open heart, which is thrilling and impressive; I also see a highly trained and critically honed eye, which is delightful – and impressive.

Which moves me more? In this work, each depends on the other. The picture of a dark-skinned woman clutching a bouquet of multicolored roses is pure visual candy – made bitter by the knowledge that she has brought them not to celebrate a love, but to remember the loss of one. On the page opposite, low-angled sunlight hides a man’s face in shadow under a red-white-and-blue hardhat; the picture is as balanced as a still life, as the man bows his head reverently, the hat emblazoned with signatures of other surviving rescue workers.

There are American flags visible throughout this collection, hanging gigantically on buildings, stitched onto clothing, and everywhere in between. This is inevitable given the book’s source material, but it is also, perhaps, a sly nod to two seminal photography books of the past century: Walker Evans’ American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans, both of which used the presence of the stars and stripes as a visual cue woven into the fabric of the books’ layout schemes.

Triller uses the same technique, placing a photo with a prominent flag at the start of the book and often beginning each section of the book with one, too. But her tale is not a patriotic or political tract – it is all about the people who come each year to remember the tragedy of 9/11 at its epicenter and who are presented here with their raw emotions on full display. Included among them are many in uniform, in family groups, in work clothes, business dress or biker attire. Many also have their own creative or political message to share, duly recorded by Triller’s camera.

The photos are presented without titles or captions – we are meant to take them in visually and draw our own conclusions about what they may mean. This is one of the book’s great strengths. It’s difficult to approach a subject so charged without succumbing to the temptation to preach, but it may be even more difficult to craft a narrative with images alone, as Triller has done very successfully here.

Text is provided in the form of a foreword by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Triller’s introduction, and a thoughtful afterword by Eleanor Heartney – all are brief, leaving the pictures to do the real communicating. They do it eloquently, and beautifully.

Note: There will be an exhibit of 11 of Marie Triller’s 9/11 photographs at The College of Saint Rose’s Massry Center for the Arts atrium gallery, 1002 Madison Ave., Albany. The show opens on Sunday, Oct. 16, and will run through Sunday, Dec. 11. Triller is an alumna of the college.

A very brief visit to New York City

Museum of Modern Art patrons view a black painting by Ad Reinhart at Abstract Expressionist New York

It had been a long time, but I finally made it to New York City last weekend, partly to catch the AbEx show at the Museum of Modern Art before it ends (which will happen on April 26).

Formally titled Abstract Expressionist New York, the show occupies several large galleries in the painting section of the museum and is made entirely from MoMA's permanent collection.

What struck me most on this rainy Saturday was how intensely crowded the museum was. It took 20 minutes just to check bags and jackets, and then the process of viewing the art became a subtle of battle of wills, wits, and patience. I really felt bad for the guards, who had to somehow try to keep watch over this priceless art, most of it unprotected by any covering or barriers, as the hordes rushed and bumped about.

Still, it was possible to find short intervals of peace - even joy - while viewing the incredible wealth of paintings, sculptures, and photographs that are included in the show. Among my best moments on this visit was the discovery of Robert Motherwell's small 1941 gem Little Spanish Prison (shown at right), a painting I don't recall having seen before, possibly because it languished in the museum's storage (though that's just a guess).

Another epiphany came from the mesmerizing effect a certain purple, brown and blue Mark Rothko painting had on me - it literally caused a sort of vertigo, and I found it almost impossible to tear myself away from it. Obviously, the painter had honed his craft to the point that he knew exactly how to use color, texture, and composition to enter the brain via the eye and create this intensely meditative experience. Astonishing.

It was gratifying to see a smaller room filled with wonderful black-and-white photographs as part of this exhibition; most of them, naturally, are by Aaron Siskind, whose supremely silvery prints could make you pretty nostalgic for the old darkroom technology. Also represented here in relative abundance are Harry Callahan and Minor White, while most of the rest of the photos shown are one-offs by the likes of Walter Chappell, Fred Sommer, and - surprisingly - Nathan Lyons.

Speaking of photography, another current show at the museum offers a historical survey of the medium seen through the eyes of women. Not being much in the mood for a ponderous lesson, I jumped ahead and then homed in on my favorite of the bunch: Helen Levitt, represented by a glorious set of 14 color prints from the '70s and '80s (one is shown at left).

Levitt's happy eye never fails to delight, and her uninflected observations of life in the streets of the city are unparalleled. Adding to my bemused amusement was the thought that many young viewers of this work may very well be seeing a phone booth in use for the first time in their lives.

Earlier the same day, my constant companion and I were drawn into a brawny and spare display of sculptures by Tom Doyle at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Chelsea (through April 30). The calligraphically gestural works in rough-hewn wood and colored bronze (one is shown below) resonated in my memory later, in a room at the Modern dominated by Franz Kline paintings and David Smith sculptures.

Doyle's work would have provided perfect company to those two, and there would have been room for one or two of them. Ah, well, wrong generation - but, thank goodness, it seems Abstract Expressionist New York is still alive and kicking.

In Memoriam: John Yang

I was greatly saddened to learn recently of the death on Sept. 28 of New York City photographer John Yang, whose elegiac series of Thacher Park pictures was shown in a solo exhibition at the Albany Institute of History & Art in the fall of 2007.

Yang, who was a child when he came to the United States from China, worked as an architect before retiring in 1978 to devote himself fully to photographic art. His work, often made with custom-built cameras of unusual dimensions (examples include 11x14-inch format and 360-degree panoramic), had been exhibited regularly at Marcuse Pfeiffer Gallery and John Stevenson Gallery in New York, Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago, Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, and other premier venues; it is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and many other museums.

The Thacher Park photographs, made primarily along the Indian Ladder Trail during five years of concentrated effort, constituted his final body of work. A beautiful catalog of that cycle was published by the Albany Institute and is available in the shop at the museum. You can learn more about Yang and his work by clicking here to go to his website.

I had the good fortune of getting to know John personally after I wrote about his Indian Ladder series for Capital Region Chronogram; the last time we saw each other was at his house in August, where he showed me two albums of landscape photos that he thought might make a book, and I took the picture of him seen above. He was an extremely gracious and thoughtful man with an impeccable eye for subtle composition and consummate photographic technique. He will be greatly missed.

John Yang John Boyd Thacher State Park toned gelatin silver print

Francis Bacon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I was fortunate to catch Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective on its last day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and, though I'm sorry to be reporting on the show after it's over, the experience merits comment.

Bacon was without doubt one of the seminal artists of the 20th century. His grotesque figuration went against the Abstract Expressionism that dominated his era, but it triumphed eventually, having presaged the dominant art of the last two decades of that century.

This show made abundantly clear why Bacon matters, with room after room of major works presented decade by decade; it also featured crisp wall texts and a display of artifacts from Bacon's studio, both of which delineated a tormented life of tremendous artistic effort.

Bacon, a homosexual Englishman from a wealthy family who grew up in Ireland, boiled all of life down to three things: Birth, copulation, and death. Lacking formal training in art, he nevertheless established early in his career a highly refined individual style, and he deviated from it very little over many decades of painting. Whether presented singly or in triptychs, the bulk of his paintings as seen in this show were vertical and of the same size (1½ by 2 meters, or about 5 by 6½ feet). The example shown above is the right third of a triptych made at the height of his career, and is as good as any in representing the elements of Bacon's painted imagery.

It won't surprise you to read that a lot of people saw this exhibition on its last day, and very few of them were smiling. It is relentlessly grim stuff - and definitely not for children, though I saw some there - but it is, in its way, absolutely full of life.

I found the early years to be pretty tough going, but was rather delighted by the middle years, where Bacon fused influences of Matisse and Picasso into the best work he'd ever made - colorful, masterfully composed, complex. Even with the same horrific biomorphism that characterizes almost everything he painted, the lyrical spaces and vibrant colors of these middle paintings are unequivocally, lushly beautiful.

Was Bacon trying to use beauty to seduce the viewer into confronting brutal realities? Or was he reveling in beauty for its own sake, even as he reveled in grotesquerie and horror?

The later works retain some of that smooth prettiness but bring back the rougher, spare aspects of the earlier Bacon, possibly because his love life was making a similar reprise. He also turned to portraiture in this period, creating the one sustained deviation from the large format paintings in the form of many 12-by-14-inch pieces, some of which are also presented in triptychs.

Altogether it is quite impressive. Though I exited the gallery with some sense of relief, there was an equal sense of wonder at the stupendous body of work Bacon had produced, and the amazing career he crafted out of it.

New York City gallery crawl, Part II

(continued from previous posting - to start at the beginning, just scroll down to Part I. )

That stroll to Yossi Milo was interrupted by a side trip - strong work beckoned from the windows of Robert Steele Gallery http://www.robertsteelegallery.com/, where a show called unbound that features the paintings and monoprints of Betsy Cain graced the front room (example at right). Cain has a great sense of color and calligraphic line. Her big, bold works were like a bracing wind that pushed our weary souls forward. It's an impressive show and it runs through May 9.

Also at Robert Steele through May 9 is a smaller showcase exhibition of wall-mounted wooden constructions and silkscreen prints by Joe Segal titled Counting Lines. The work is minimalist, symmetrical and highly textural. I really liked the surface qualities of the wooden pieces and the way the silkscreens translated that sensibility into a paper medium. Two thumbs up for Steele and these two artists.

Our next and final stop was at a venerable Chelsea building that houses 29 galleries at 547 W. 27th Street, including that of Ron's friend Michael Foley http://www.foleygallery.com/, who greeted us warmly and enthusiastically. It's a pretty amazing experience to wander what is essentially a vertical flea market of contemporary art, where all floors of the building are devoted to visual expression, some divided up into as many as eight or 10 individual spaces, each with its own purpose and personality.

This is the Chelsea of legend - the grass-roots movement that opened up this off-the-beaten-track neighborhood decades ago and made it safe for art dealers and collectors from all over the world to invade is very much alive and well in the nooks and crannies of 547 W. 27th. Though Foley Gallery was between shows, we wandered freely nearby, finding that every little gallery showed something different and made us feel genuinely welcome.

One such is Tria http://www.triagallery.net/, a gallery with three co-owners that has a solo show by Frank Olt through May 9. Olt combines unexpected media, such as fired ceramic and linen, to make lovely, subtle abstract paintings (example at left). It was refreshing to see his show of modest-scale work (many as small as a foot square) when so much art lately has been too big and loud.

Another highlight came in the form of a gallery with several dispersed, oddly shaped spaces on the same floor. Called AC [Institute Direct Chapel], its "mission is to advance the understanding of art through investigation, research and education."

The positive energy was just overflowing at AC http://www.artcurrents.org/ (another form of excess, maybe , but a good one). I wish I could send you to see the installations there by Jeff Becker, Ann Torke, and Bryan Whitney, but they ended on April 11. What was wonderful about them was that they addressed this whole business of excess - Becker by creating a miniature city out of discarded plastic lids and other junk; Torke by collecting and encapsulating detritus in graceful vaselike forms; and Whitney by channeling his inner Buddha to attempt to come to grips with the too many photographs he takes and the spiritual concept of Myriad: The Ten Thousand Things. I could relate!

Finally, though not big or loud or excessive, another venue in the building occupies the whole fourth floor, and that is Aperture Gallery http://www.aperture.org/, where fine photography has a gracious home, and fine photography books have a champion publisher.

The current show at Aperture, through May 7, is a very powerful and difficult body of work - difficult because the subject matter is so very sad. Titled Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape, the large exhibition features color portraits and interviews by Jonathan Torgovnik (example above) of Rwandan women and their children born as a result of the atrocities of the 1990s.

Sensitive and respectful, the portraits show these women's pain while preserving their dignity, but they do push the boundaries between art and activism / art and journalism toward a place that can leave you uncomfortable. I found the experience somewhat too emotionally draining, and was thankful for the comfort of Aperture's firm leather couches to regain my composure.

It was one heck of a day of looking around at New York art. If you go - wear sensible shoes.

New York City gallery crawl, Part I

Nothing defines our time like the phrase "culture of excess," and there's nothing like a trip to New York City to put excess in the forefront of your mind.

New York has too much of just about everything (except maybe open space), and that includes art galleries to choose from. This is overabundantly clear in Chelsea, where it seems every storefront, former garage, factory building and hole in the ground is filled with art.

Wandering around there for a few hours on a recent visit, I thought a plan of attack might have its merits, but found pretty quickly that a nearly random approach was probably as good a way as any to cope with the overwhelming sensation of too-muchness. It's like being in a grand bazaar, where everywhere you turn there are tantalizing choices - you just make a decision and trust that what you got was as good as the stuff you missed, and anyway, what else can you do?

So my friend Ron and I started at a place that has terrific architecture and blue chip art. Jim Kempner Fine Art http://www.jimkempnerfineart.com/ features a sculpture garden behind a high, solid steel wall and a tri-level gallery space inside. The work shown was priced up to $700,000 (that would be Robert Indiana's crassly commercial Hope sculpture at right). I saw little that I really liked, however, and sensed an unmistakable atmosphere of pure desperation at the gallery- after all, this is post-meltdown New York.

Our next stop was similarly posh, though a more welcoming space, and it was filled with name artists, including Warhol, Basquiat, Lewitt, Arman and other dead people. Apart from the Lewitt, it left me with a morbid sensation of impending doom - so I declared an instant moratorium on anything that wasn't from a living artist, and preferably not so damn overpriced.

Immediately, things got better. Bruce Silverstein http://www.brucesilverstein.com/ provided a nice palate cleanser in the form of a three-part photo show, by E.O. Hoppe, Andre Kertesz, and Cloud 9, which presents nine cloud pictures by Alfred Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston. Despite the unmistakable deadness of all the artists, it was a fresh presentation of dazzling black-and-white images, especially those by Kertesz. It runs through April 25.

We next stopped in at Paul Kasmin Gallery http://www.paulkasmingallery.com/ , where a group of very brightly striped paintings (see left) by one of those Young Brits we're always hearing about was on view. Ian Davenport will be showing there through May 2 and is worth a look if you like that sort of thing. The paintings left me somewhat cold, but the young gallerina's smile was so warm it made my day.

With a new bounce in my step, it was on to more down-to-earth settings and stylings. A John Waters solo photography exhibition at Marianne Boesky http://www.marianneboeskygallery.com/ had all the humor and grunge of his films; and in the gallery's project room were some really sensitive portraits by Kaye Donachie, which were somehow still campy enough to hang with Waters. Nice place.

Right nearby was an installation at Gladstone Gallery http://www.gladstonegallery.com/ by a Polish artist named Miroslaw Balka that was inspired by, and just about as pleasant as, the Holocaust. I sort of wish I'd given that one a miss.

But what happiness to have not missed the fantastic installation just down the block by Tony Oursler at Metro Pictures http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/, though I am sorry to have to report that it ended on Saturday.

Oursler is well known for making video projections on three-dimensional objects to create a new kind of sculpture; sound often adds a creepy and/or humorous element to his work. The three-room installation at Metro had a walk-through forest of tree-sized burning cigarettes (that also burned backwards - unburned?), a huge, talking five-dollar bill, and tiny houses with running theatrical/domestic dramas projected into them, along with quite a few other pieces both large and small. All of it was pretty damn brilliant.

Next up was a purposeful stroll to Yossi Milo Gallery http://www.yossimilo.com/, one of the best contemporary photography galleries anywhere and a must-see for shooters like Ron and me. We were not disappointed - the current exhibition by Myoung Ho Lee, titled Tree, is a wonderful series of tree portraits, created on-site by suspending a huge canvas backdrop behind the tree and then shooting it within but isolated from its surroundings.

Lee uses impeccable large-format color photo technique, and then applies equally sophisticated digital skills to remove from the image the visible traces of the bars and cables that hold the canvas. the resulting pictures are fictional, or illusionistic, but also touchingly real.

The Albany Patroons, and other loose ends

Although basketball is not a visual art, I am a fan and a player, and I am very happy to be able to say that I attended what was very possibly the last game ever for the Albany Patroons and the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) on Sunday night at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany.

But first, for you art lovers, here's an aside worth pursuing:

A photographer I know, Bill DeLanney, has a show at Fulton-Montgomery Community College that is nicely introduced in this blog entry by former Gazette colleague Bill Ackerbauer:
http://www.leaderherald.com/page/blogs.detail/display/276.html

I first met DeLanney several years ago when, still new at this, he came to me for a critique. I loved his work then, and now so does just about everybody else (such as restaurateur Angelo Mazzone, who filled his Aperitivo dining rooms with DeLanney photos). I haven't seen the show at FMCC, but it will surely be as strong as everything else DeLanney does. Check it out if you can; it's there through March 13.

And now back to the Patroons.

My enthusiasm for Albany's professional basketball team goes back to the '80s, when I had a gallery not far from the Armory and began attending games after work. The team had a run of great years back then, in which a number of players went up to the NBA (one, Mario Elie won multiple NBA championships post-Patroons, including one as a starter with the Houston Rockets) and a string of three coaches also became NBA stalwarts (the late Bill Musselman, George Karl and Phil Jackson).

In those days, the Armory regularly packed in upwards of 4,000 people for games, and the place literally rocked. While last night's attendance was announced at a perhaps generous 1,788, there was still enough energy in the house to bring back a taste of the good old days, and the Patroons fed off the crowd to mount a strong comeback to nearly win a terrifically tough game. Instead, they went down fighting, losing the championship-deciding game 109-107 in overtime to a very talented Lawton-Fort Sill Cavalry team.

It was a great show for a die-hard group of fans - and, I hope, not a swan song for professional basketball in Albany or for the CBA as a whole. For an excellent full report on the game by the Times Union's Tim Wilkin, go to http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=768243&category=SPORTS.

And now, back to art. Last week, I rode down to New York with my friend John Hampshire for his second exhibition at Chelsea's Phoenix Gallery (http://www.artinfo.com/galleryguide/20133/6671/120007/phoenix-gallery-new-york/exhibition/vimala-steadmanjohn-hampshire/). Because John is a friend, I will not be offering a critique of the show - but I can say without conflict that he is one of the regional artists to watch, and his work at Phoenix is a good example of why that is. John employs a mind-bogglingly complex system of markmaking (in both black-and-white and color) to create images that are both peculiarly abstract and highly realistic. He presents one color painting and four black-and-white drawings in this show, through Feb. 28.

Another exhibition I saw on this trip was a total knockout: Recurrence: Aaron Siskind at Bruce Silverstein (http://www.brucesilverstein.com/) is a tour-de-force of exhibition design that features a dazzling array of vintage Siskind prints in several rooms that make the most out of Siskind's full black-and-white palette (shown: Vermont 1987, four gelatin silverprints).

The work is presented in groups, some in a grid arrangement, some stacked or lined up, but always to great effect in keeping with the show's intention of exploring the theme of recurrence in Siskind's work.

The pictures are all matted in white, but the framing color varies from group to group - some are white, some a lighter shade of grey, some a darker shade of grey and some black. Also, the gallery's walls are variously painted white and shades of grey to complement this presentation, and it works extremely well.

I comment on the design of the show, because too often a strong collection of work fails to connect with me as a viewer because of insufficiently thoughtful presentation. It is also possible to go too far, getting cute or overbearing with labels and such; so I really appreciate and commend a gallery when they know how to do it just right. This was my first visit to Silverstein, but it surely won't be the last. The show has been extended through March 7, as has the concurrent exhibition by Shinichi Maruyama, which I also wholeheartedly recommend.

Luigi Ghirri at Aperture Gallery

It was with a huge sense of fulfillment that I took in the current exhibition of photographs by Luigi Ghirri at Aperture Gallery in New York (through Jan. 29 http://www.aperture.org/gallery/).

Please let me explain. I first came upon Ghirri's work in early 1993 as I was beginning a two-year stay in central Italy. He was from Modena (like the balsamic vinegar) and I found his work in a substantial catalog that accompanied a retrospective exhibition that had just been held in Bologna. In the book, charmingly titled "Vista con Camera" ("View with a Room"), I found an eclectic, regional sensibility represented in highly refined color photographs, many of which resembled many of my own. The elation I felt in finding an artistic soulmate in my new country quickly turned to a feeling of loss, though, when I learned that Ghirri had died at 49 years old the previous year, and that the show was an elegy.

Ghirri was quite well-known in the European art and publishing fields, but he was almost completely unknown in the United States. None of his many books had been published in English, and I never did meet anyone here in the US who had heard of him (though the record shows he exhibited at Light Gallery in New York).

But now we have a fine exhibition of his work at Aperture and a beautiful monograph in English that accompanies it. "It's beautiful here, isn't it ... " is the title of the show and book, and immediately expresses the sweet openness with which Ghirri approached his life in photography and in the high plains of north-central Italy. No naif, Ghirri was a deep-thinking philosopher and theorist, whose esoterically probing writings are peppered throughout the show in perfect proportion to the 90 pictures on view.

Constructed as a room within a room, the large gallery places the viewer immediately into the labyrinth of Ghirri's roving mind, led, of course, by his all-seeing eye. A very large opening panel presents a wallpaper-like grid of simple sky snapshots, about 200 of them selected from a total numbering 365, for an entire year in which he took one picture of the sky each day. This introduction sets the emotional and intellectual tone for the show, but it does not represent Ghirri's genius for careful perusal and selection; rather, it shows his almost religious exuberance in accessing the joys and sorrows of daily life through photography.

The rest of the exhibition consists of framed pictures of generally modest size - no art-fair mural prints here - grouped in thematic runs of short or long duration, and organized somewhat, though not strictly, chronologically, from the earliest work of the 1970s through his last years. The walls are white, but in the central room, where some of the strongest work is displayed, they have been painted a middle blue, which very nicely offsets the soft colors of the works hung there.

Ghirri's subject matter is about equally divided between landscape and interior. Architecture is a dominant theme, and people are few. Unlike his contemporary color pioneer William Eggleston (who wrote the book's preface), he seems more of a quiet observer than a participant in the images, and he keeps his distance in that sense. But his observations are acute, placing him near Eggleston in the category of social commentary. Late-20th-century color practitioners Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld also share his sensibility.

The early work, mostly shot in 35mm, has a sense of the absurd and a structured form. Many of these images are composed vertically, and play visual tricks on the eye. Ghirri's sly observations of cityscape and landscape as playgrounds for the fertile mind are characteristic of the movement in the '70s that eventually took on the name New Topographics.

Later work, especially several 20x24-inch Polaroids done in 1980, appears more personal and allegorical, which leads smoothly to the latest work, in which Ghirri has constructed groups of pictures that together form a portrait of their subjects - the artist Giorgio Morandi and the architect Aldo Rossi - not by depicting the men themselves but by recording the details of their studios.

These last two bodies, shot in 6x7 centimeter format and printed at 16x20 inches, are shown in the central blue room, and they remain my favorites of the show for their masterful use of color and composition and the strong and subtle ways in which they work together. As with the rest of the show, the prints are both vintage and contemporary.

Ghirri was known to take his work to a drugstore for processing, and while the technical quality of some of the earlier prints is acceptable, some others in the show are noticeably off-color and unevenly printed. But the new prints are just perfect in every way, using the latest in inkjet technology to appear exactly like expertly made C-prints.

Obviously, Ghirri was not available to plan the show or its installation, but his wife, Paola, deserves credit for a marvelous job of culling and curating. There's no doubt Luigi would be proud of the show and very pleased to be reaching wider audiences on these shores at last.