REVIEWS
The Hudson Review, Autumn 2006
At the Galleries
LINDA SCHRANK AT ROSENBERG + KAUFMAN FINE ART
by Karen Wilkin
Linda Schrank’s elegant abstractions at Rosenberg + Kaufman and Susanna Heller’s wacky urban landscapes at Magnan Projects posited very different ideas of picture- making, but both did so with conviction and originality. At first acquaintance, Schrank’s recent panels seemed to be loose accretions of opposing swipes, rather like casual, layered grids. Very quickly, they begin to unravel and to declare themselves as palimpsests of rhythmic marks, at a range of different scales, warped out of true, but loosely disciplined by the dominant square of the support. A kind of basket-weave structure, now more visible, now less, kept everything together, but flexed and swayed, as if responding to shifts in tension determined from outside the borders of the image or distorted by internal pressures. Broad translucent bands cancelled out notes of more opaque color, creating a luminous, golden haze, while dark, repetitive scraped-through dots, lozenges and staccato bars provided counterpoint and established new, more elusive spatial zones. It all seemed relaxed and spontaneous, but when you tried to penetrate Schrank’s dense tangles of strokes and sweeps, you discovered that you were quickly repelled and turned back to the painted surface.
For all the aggressive materiality of Schrank’s recent paintings, their lush, radiant hues and sense of unifying warmth – or coolness, in some of the works on paper – had associations with the art of the past. But just when it seemed as if these dense, deceptive pictures were woven out of the artist’s fragmented recollections of the old and modern masters she most reveres, the floating dots and lozenges triggered thoughts of the photomechanical and the commercial, further destabilizing associations and rendering Schrank’s paintings even more mysterious. I liked best some of the middle-size pictures, in which the scale of the mark and the scale of the whole panel seemed particularly felicitous. By contrast, some of the marks in the larger panels seemed a little small for the task. But that’s a quibble. Schrank’s recent show included some of her strongest paintings to date. They made me eager to see what she will produce in the next months in the Italian studio where she spends part of every year.
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