A beautifully curated exhibit at Pyramid Atlantic featuring prints by three artists: Curt Belshe, Jenny Freestone and Jake Muirhead. Intellectually challenging as well as technically brilliant, they are linked by the way they move between figuration, psychology and imagination.
Read MoreThe numbers are staggering. Americans use approximately 35 billion plastic bottles and containers each year. Since its invention, which completely transformed consumer culture, we have only increased our plastic footprint, particularly since major plastic production began in the 1940s and 1950s. We need to do something about this now, and Kirsty Little is trying to draw our attention to this inalterable fact by creating a work that calls the viewer to recognize the problem.
Read MoreA small group of standing bronze sculptures by sculptor Squire Broel is currently in the outdoor sculpture area at American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. At significant distances from one another, there is a strong sense of loneliness in this installation. In the bright sun, with angled shadows from the building, totems in the American desert may come to mind, although the aesthetic seems more universal, potentially recalling various primitive or prehistoric sources.
Read MoreGallery B in downtown Bethesda is hosting the finalists of the annual Bethesda Painting Awards competition. This year’s selection exhibits a pronounced showing of painting, in the traditional sense, both figurative and abstract. It’s been some time since we’ve seen such a strong feeling of hand is in the works represented, that is, of paint on surface, made into recognizable or abstract imagery.
Read MoreThe retrospective exhibition of the work of Venetian artist Jacopo Robusti, known as Il Tintoretto, is still on view at the National Gallery. Although Tintoretto was enormously successful in his own time and place, he remains relatively unknown to the general public. The reasons for this are many. Not least among them are the many myths that stubbornly follow the artist’s reputation portraying him as an outsider, a rebel, a difficult and bizarre personality, and perhaps most problematically: a Mannerist.
Read MoreA remarkable two-part exhibition of recent work by Washington DC artist Alonzo Davis is currently in the art galleries of the Rachel Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center of the Northern Virginia Community College Alexandria campus. Comprised of Davis’ Navigation and Migrant series, the underlying and unifying theme of the exhibition is travel, of “finding one’s way in unfamiliar territory,” whether that territory is in the vastness of the sea, the fearful emptiness of the desert, or in the changes in one’s life.
Read MoreA brief art-note disusing the small encaustic paintings by Angela White
Read MoreMayorga has made pink her brand. Her exhibit PINK ranchos and other ephemeral zip codes refers specifically to the oppression of women and girls, but more generally, to large portions of the populations of Latin American countries, especially those where the split in living conditions between the wealthy and the poor is extremely sharp, and where the violence and terror inflicted by governments and/or gangs is most commonly directed at families with children living in ephemeral housing and economic deprivation.
Read MoreA thought provoking exhibit curated by Maria Karametou is at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery on U Street, NW. Its title, To Eat or Not to Eat has more to do with Karametou’s vision for the show than what is actually exhibited. Nevertheless, what is included is not only interesting from a political, environmental and theoretical point of view, but also from an aesthetic one.
Read MoreNew paintings by Isabel Manalo at Addison/Ripley are a departure for her, exploring large format gestural compositions in bright colors. Yet they represent a continuation of the themes of Filipina identity and conceptual self-portraiture that remain central to her thinking. Called Adrenaline, the show’s title refers to powerful energies released in response to current events. Worked in a variety of media, they are the result of an emotional encounter with the canvas, painted on the floor in a process that recalls the Abstract Expressionist idea. Yet, for Manalo these paintings express her identity in a way exclusive to the Philippines, as each work begins with a character from the Baybayin script.
Read MoreThe exhibition of the eight finalists of sixteenth Trawick Prize for Contemporary Art competition is on view at Gallery B in Bethesda. This year, there is a sense that the jurors gravitated toward the conceptually subtle, the formally elegant and the well-crafted. Winners this year ranged from an environmentally conscious installation, to a draftsman who transforms the ordinary into extraordinary drawings, to a collaborative installation that has overtones of spiritual atonement.
Read MoreThe title of this three person show now at Hemphill Fine Arts, CMD + F is a computer command for a search within a document. Area artists Tommy Bobo, James Huckenpahler and Rachel Schmidt are all working with computer based new media, each of them searching for new ways to create art in this fast-changing digital world. The results, as well presented here, are all fascinating, showing the potential of these experimental techniques.
Read MoreA small but impressive exhibit of paintings by Joan Belmar is on view at Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington. This series of works painted on heavy paper with acrylic, ink and oil, are the result of a renewed acquaintance with Caravaggio, the early Italian Baroque master known for his realist approach and his limited, but intensely rich palette. Belmar continues to renew his art in an evident trajectory of style, content and medium.
Read MoreA brief review of Fluid Dynamics which includes works by Jacqui Crocetta, Brendan L. Smith, Clare Winslow and Farhad Heidarian.
Read MoreThe 14th edition of the Bethesda Painting Awards encourages and supports painters and the art of painting. The jurors may have been interested in a more restricted definition of painting than some jurors have been in recent years. There’s an overall impression of hand, of painterly expression. Painting may have died a few times in the past fifty years, but at the moment it is alive and well in the DMV.
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