Mixing It Up: the Effects of Texture in the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery

ART Magazine.  San Antonio, Texas.  By Sarah Luginbill.

 

The Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in a townhouse on New York City’s Upper East Side.  Its collection, with works by various modern artists such as Picasso and Warhol, is displayed in an intimate, comfortable setting.  Several of the pieces step beyond painted canvas to encompass texture and mixed media.  These unique works stand out even more when hung beside conventional paintings.  Here is a survey of the range of textured works in the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery.

 

Subtlety is the essence of Larry Rivers’ collage entitled Civil War.  In it, dreams float above a sleeper who is lying in bed.  The dreams take shape before the viewer’s eyes as two flags, one Confederate and the other Union.  A white uniform floats between the two abstracted flags.  There are layers of paper and paint, each varied from shiny to matte and bright to faded.  Child-like flowers and scribbles decorate the “dream-space” as well.  These pencil doodles may have been intended to contrast the nature of “adult” and “child” dreams, or to represent the many subjects explored by our subconscious.  However, the scribbles are distracting and seem out of place.  It looks as if Larry Rivers’ child found the artwork and decided to contribute.

 

 The idea behind Louise Nevelson’s Northern Shores I is simple: wood painted black.  The image itself, however, is more complex.  It is a large piece, with an entire wall devoted to it’s display.  Without bright colors and other distractions in the work, the wood grain is rendered visible to the viewer from underneath the black paint.  This adds even more texture, in addition to the layers of wooden shapes.  There is an elegance to the piece.  It is not industrial, but almost soft.

 

Kwang Young Chun’s Aggregation 02-SE15 thrives on texture and detail.  Every folded paper is the same shape and size.  Part of the piece is flattened, which heightens the contrast between the raised paper and the smooth plane of paper.  From a distance, the artwork has the illusion of a beehive: busy and in motion.  There is no color, which allows the texture and detail of the piece to command the viewer’s attention.  This work was clearly time-consuming, and the viewer can appreciate the artist’s endeavors through both the large scale and minute detail of the art.

 

Hanging opposite Aggregation 02-SE15, still with plenty of texture and the addition of color, is Christian Faur’s Boy with Glasses.  Individual, handcast crayons are arranged to form a portrait of a youth.  The use of crayons, predominantly a kid’s tools, suggests that the young man’s childhood now makes up his identity.  The colors range from soft pastels to bright hues.  The image is a bit dizzying to look at, and the picture appears very pixelated.  It is hard to stare and contemplate the piece, yet the work is intriguing.

 

Texture is often used in contemporary art, and the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery holds great examples of what artists can accomplish through texture and mixed media.  From folded paper to painted wood, these unique pieces incorporate different mediums of art to relate a sentiment or story to the audience.