The mission of Lesley Dill’s ‘Faith & the Devil’ could not be any more ambitious: the artist aims to examine the eternal struggle between faith and evil in philosophy and literature. To us, this sounds like the college thesis from hell, and standing amidst the installation, you start to get the feeling the artist began to go mad in the process.
Though long absent from the New York art scene, Frederick James Brown, the Georgia-born, Chicago-bred expressionist painter who died on May 5 at age 67 from cancer in Scottsdale, Arizona, carved out a significant niche in the early days of SoHo.
Frederick J. Brown had a long and prolific career producing work on religious, historical and urban themes in addition to his portraiture. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.
Jesús Moroles considers granite “the core and heart of the universe.” His new sculptures exemplify his recognizable and revered technique, presented in small- to large-scale and utilizing a range of granite including Texas Pink, Dakota, Black and Fredericksburg. The abstract works continue to resound with suggestions of nature and man and explore the coexistence of the two. Trained formally in the United States and having spent a year in the quarries in Pietrasanta, Italy, Moroles is recognized internationally as one of the greatest sculptors working with granite today.
Ersy is revered for her work rooted in precise craftsmanship of materials including bronze, silver and wood. Scale, perspective and presentation play critical roles. The desired effect is that the viewer’s own size and relation to the piece become questioned. She recently received high critical praise for her 40-year retrospective at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, “Ersy: Architect of Dreams.” Her exhibition at the Arthur Roger Gallery is based on work included in the retrospective.
It has been said, most famously by the 17th-century poet John Donne, that “No man is an island.” And while no doubt true in the philosophical sense that Donne intended, human history has largely been defined by the things that isolate and divide us as individuals and communities, not the least of which are the ideological and geographical divisions that confront us in everyday life. In ways both physical and metaphorical, Luis Cruz Azaceta has long been an artist of islands. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1942, he emigrated to this country in 1960, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and made a name for himself on another island, Manhattan, as he rose to prominence in the Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1970s and 1980s.