KAREN WILKIN
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free-standing and table-mounted, that suggest walls, columns, secret
chambers. When he succeeds best, you mentally enter the space defined
or implied by planes of concrete and steel, but the pieces declare them–
selves as single, volumetric objects, the way traditional figure sculptures
do. I'm less convinced by Isherwood's "baroque" pieces, where concrete
ripples over steel structure, masking geometry with "soft" forms, but I'm
willing to go along with it, to see where it takes him. Isherwood is one of
the most thoughtful sculptors of his generation, and like Ainslie and
Bloom a young artist to watch with interest and anticipation.
What else did I recommend to my visitors? Louise Fishman's paint–
ings at Robert Miller Gallery in September and October, de Kooning
drawings at Barbara Mathes in November and December, and the little
Gorky exhibition at the Whitney from October to January. Fishman's
show of her brooding, layered canvases was, to my eye, her best to date.
The strongest pictures were somber and a little fierce, so much so that it
was tempting to read their grid structure as a metaphor for suppressed or
disciplined force. Fishman showed two types of pictures: grids and loose,
more gestural paintings, apparently the products of explosive gestures,
which reminded me, not to their benefit, of Gerhardt Richter's pompous
abstractions down the street at Marian Goodman. I much preferred the
grids, with their ambiguous swipes of dull, reverberant, almost metallic
color. You weren't quite sure at first what was on top of what; were the
floating rectangles created by intersecting passes or imposed on a layered
surface? Exposed fragments of color between the rectangles offered clues,
but nothing definitive. The most successful of the grid paintings seemed
as much about their own history as about ideas of confrontation or the
division of an expanse, so that they seemed to keep evolving as you
watched, their forthright geometry as much a result of shifting density as
of shifting color. I was sorry to learn that the big black-and-white
"sweep" pictures (the Richter-ish ones) were more recent than the grids,
but Fishman is probably a good enough painter to work through what–
ever interests her in the series and get back to the high level of the grids;
at least I hope so.
The miniature retrospective of de Kooning drawings at Barbara
Mathes Gallery was a gem. Not that it shouldn't have been, given de
Kooning's well-known prowess as a draughtsman. (The quality and im–
pact of the drawings so outstripped the paintings in his Whitney retro–
spective some years ago that wits called de Kooning the first artist in his–
tory to have upstaged himsel() The Mathes show gave us the full spec–
trum of de Kooning's achievement through an excellent selection of first–
rate works, some with impressive provenances, from early portraits as
meticulous and sensitive as anything by Ingres to late light-filled
"landscapes." So many weak, hesitant late paintings have been shown
