Deborah Bohnert

1952 - 2020

Deborah Bohnert


News

2013-2020
Notable
2000-2012
Reviews

2013 - 2018

2000 - 2012

Notable

Spinning Straw Into Gold
The Ethics of Production
Deborah Bohnert and Rachel Dayson-Levy
November 13 - December 14, 2007

The Ethics of Transgression: Is it Still Possible?",
a lecture by by renowned art critic Donald Kuspit
November 14, 2007 at 7:00 p.m.


Barbara O'Brien's statement on Lush

Artscope Review - November/December 2007, by James Foritano - Read the Review

Boston Globe Review - November 29, 2007, by Cate McQuaid - Read the Review

Trustman Gallery, Simmons College
Trustman Gallery, Simmons College

Deborah Bohnert
The Little Fruits (one of 35 - 4 x 5 inches each), Deborah Bohnert 2007

"The Ethics of Transgression: Is it Still Possible?"

Simmons College presents "The Ethics of Transgression: Is it Still Possible?" a lecture by renowned art critic Donald Kuspit, November 14, 2007 at 7 p.m. in the Linda K. Paresky Center, Main College Building, 300 The Fenway, in Boston. The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

Kuspit's lecture will respond to issues in contemporary art as seen through the three-exhibition series "Spinning Straw into Gold: The Ethics of Production," on view throughout the fall in the Trustman Gallery at Simmons College. The series, curated by Trustman Gallery Director Barbara O'Brien, features artists Chantal Zakari; Two Girls Working: Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki; Deborah Bohnert; and Rachel Dayson-Levy. It focuses on the inspiration for, and production of, contemporary art in a post-appropriation age where the "hunt and gather" model has expanded from art historical images to pop culture and now includes the cyber arena.

Kuspit is a prolific and widely published author, essayist and curator. His book "The End of Art," published in 2004, is a wry, sometimes caustic assessment of contemporary art from his point of view, privileged by his decades in the field. In 2005, Barry Gewen of the "New York Times" called Kuspit, "a New York critic at the red-hot center of the contemporary art scene." He is the editor of "Art Criticism," a contributing editor of "Artforum," and a regular contributor to "Art New England" magazine and "Artnet," an online journal.

Currently, Kuspit is a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He earned an M.A. in philosophy from Yale University, as well as an M.A. in art history from Pennsylvania State University. He earned a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Frankfurt, Germany.

The lecture is sponsored by Simmons College's Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences as part of the series, "Careers in the Liberal Arts."

The exhibition series, "Spinning Straw into Gold: The Ethics of Production," was funded by the LEF Foundation and by the Catherine Hannah Behrend Class of '70 Fund.

For more information, contact Marcia Lomedico at 617-521-2268 or marcia.lomedico@simmons.edu

Barbara O'Brien's statement on Lush

"Rachel Dayson-Levy and Deborah Bohnert will be exhibiting their art later this semester in the exhibition "Lush." I entitled the show "Lush" because it seemed to me that the world with its bounty of objects and images has become an overgrown garden that serves as a drawing table for artists. We have moved past appropriation where the act of borrowing or using images is itself the subject of the art, into an age of "Post-Appropriation" where it is taken for granted that artists will incorporate images, ideas and objects from art history, Pop culture, the lost and the found; in the transformative arena of the studio and the gallery they will claim ownership and make them their own.

Deb Bohnert builds on the tradition of the objet trouve, the found object. She finds, purchases or otherwise acquires objects that are generally small enough to be held in the palm of ones hand. These objects are paired with the produce of Deb s parallel studio practice intimately scaled abstract paintings. Deb creates a dialogue in the pairing of an object and a painting, the spark, the charged space, between the object and the painting is experienced by the viewer. The tradition of the objet trouve and Pop Art meet in a head-on collision with both an aesthetic and a psychological point of impact. Most of the works, entitled "Small Fruits" are intimately scaled the paintings are only four x five inches square. The found object becomes a talisman for the artist. In the transformation of the studio, it takes on autobiographic or psychological meaning. The history of women and surrealism is invoked. Deb is a collector, a gleaner, an artist. Claiming what one finds is a legal doctrine almost as old as Shakespeare s Edward the III "Possession is 9/10ths of the law." The dialogue regarding ownership and authorship continues here."

- Barbara O'Brien

"The Ethics of Transgression: Is it Still Possible?" by Donald Kuspit

Artscope, November/December 2007
Deborah Bohnert and Rachel Dayson-Levy: Lush
By James Foritano
Excerpts from Artscope November - December 2007

When I was a child in the 1950's, it seemed to my childish apprehension that the most vital genre was the "Creature Feature," when who knew what would charge out of who knew where to go where only U.S. government troops and perhaps God could follow. And, no matter how final the defeat of this plot-ravishing "thing." It would always leave behind a spore, a seed, from which, if not itself, its kin would emerge once more to throw all our normal expectations into a cocked hat.

Now that I am an adult, I search for other ways to defeat my expectations, to go behind the pedestrian scenario that we all jointly conspire to erect over that least smidgeon of daily dread. And when it does emerge, to the alert of all our senses, it has that strange beauty of the unfamiliar because less acknowledged reality lies peeping from within the more manicured, more acceptable version.

... Deborah Bohnert is another deft prestidigitator who questions different truism through her collection of toys, but is of the same "stripe" as Datson-Levy with differently subversive methods and, also a unique quality of affection. The popping colors of even the smallest toys from her lode of plastic, rubber and feathered creations are warrant enough for our attention, but dislocate and reassemble them, put them on a pedestal, enclose them in a glass test-tube, angle them just so, and their identity shifts ambiguously, even self-assertively, so that what "grabbed" our attention temporarily now holds it.

Give them backgrounds of layered acrylic textured with sinuous "crackles," floating abstract shapes composed to echo their three-dimensional plasticity, and these toys are never going back into their box at playtime's end. Instead, they dialogue with their new painterly backgrounds as awed onlooker, rambunctious participant or perhaps as an escapee regarding wistfully the illusionist frames from which they’ve dared to emerge into a world of time and consequence.

Detail Fresh Fruits 2007
Detail of Fresh Fruits #2 by Deborah Bohnert

 

Boston Globe
'Lush': Deborah Bohnert and Rachel Dayson-Levy
By Cate McQuaid
November 29, 2007

This tangy, gorgeous, funny exhibit highlights the talents of two artists who spin froth out of nightmares. Bohnert positions found objects such as toys in front of abstract paintings, which are in themselves bright objects straddling children's-party pep and ragged decay. The pairings (as in "The Little Fruits #35a," right) are comic, provocative, and visually resonant. Dayson-Levy's viciously whimsical watercolors (such as "Tilt-a-Whirl," above) are part political cartoon, part acid trip, part "Alice in Wonderland," mulling the relationships between women and men. Mon-Fri 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Free. Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston. 617-521-2268. simmons.edu/trustman

The Little Fruits 2007
The Little Fruits #35a by Deborah Bohnert

 


Book Cover

This is the cover of a German Book called Foto-Ethnographie by Dr. Ulrich Hägele. This photo of mine from "Bohnert Color Series" made the cover of the book.... It happens to be a picture of me when I was in my twenties that I painted on.

Cover of Foto-Ethnographie by Dr. Ulrich Hägele
German title: Ulrich Hägele: Foto-Ethnographie. Die visuelle Methode in der volkskundlichen Kulturwissenschaft. (TVV-Verlag) Tübingen 2007, 420p, 350 illustrations, ISBN 10: 3-932512-48-0; ISBN 13: 978-3-932512-48-3; 36 Euro.

Translated in English: Photo-Ethnography. The Visual Method in Folkore and Cultural Studies.

Since the beginning in the 19th century German cultural studies have used photography for illustrating and documenting costumes, customs and rural life.

Today the ethnological disciplines are using visual methods for serious research in Visual Culture or Visual Anthropology. The methods follow iconographical or sociological rules for photographic field work.

This book approaches the history of ethnographic photography within three aspects: social indentification, setting of political ideology and scientific profession.

It is the first book in German language that describes history and methods of ethnographical photography in a detailed and temporal comprehensive way.



 

 


In Nature's Company
October 9, 2004 - September 18, 2005
Deborah Bohnert has two paintings in this show at the
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

1024 Days XX, Deborah Bohnert
The Water Paintings/1024 Days XX
and The Water Paintings/ 1024 Days - Diptych

In Nature's Company presents an exciting array of works by contemporary Massachusetts artists in PEM's new Art & Nature Center. This exhibition explores how artists relate to and communicate about the natural world through their art. Diverse works - including paintings, quilts, photography, sculpture, and furniture - by 20 different artists, express myriad perspectives on nature through creative uses of materials and compelling imagery. In Nature's Company includes pieces by such renowned artists as furniture maker Judy Kensley McKie, quilt maker Clara Wainwright, sculptor Kitty Wales, and origamist Michael LaFosse, among many others. In Nature's Company also features hands-on exhibits that invite visitors to delve deeper into the artist's process and to consider their own personal connections with nature.

 


"The American River"
2003
(traveling museum exhibition shown at four museums over the past two years)

The primary curator of the show, Carl Belz, Curator Emeritus of the Rose Museum at Brandeis, selected one artist out of over forty artists juried into the exhibition as the recipient of a top award. In a ceremony before an audience of over one hundred attendees, he awarded the $5000.00 prize, Best of Show, to Deborah Bohnert of Marblehead, Massachusetts for her piece, " 1024 Days VI" a mixed media piece sized 12 x 12 inches.

1024 Days VI, Deborah Bohnert
1024 Days VI, 12 x 12, 2002

The traveling museum exhibition entitled "The American River" was shown at four museums over the past two years, with the final exhibition just having closed at the Florence Griswold Museum in Lyme, Connecticut.

There, over 6000 people viewed the fifty paintings, works on paper and photographs that comprised this celebration of our riverways in contemporary artwork as imagined by artists from all over the country. The brochure documenting the exhibition featured poetry on the rivers written by school age children from throughout the United States . To receive a copy of the catalog, please contact the GRAI offices.

Great River Arts P.O. Box 48
95 Rockingham Street
Bellows Falls, VT 05101
802-463-3330 / 802-463-3322(fax)

Read the review of the exhibit from the July 2003 issue of American Artist

A RIVER RUNS Through It

It seems a foregone conclusion that when the Great River Arts Institute was looking for an appropriate subject for a national juried competition, a show focused on American rivers would be the outcome. "The Great River Arts Institute is founded on the shores of the Connecticut River," explains Cynthia Reeves, the institute's creative director, "so the theme was uppermost in our minds. The river is ubiquitous and seemed to allow for a lot of interpretive work, as well as representational." The prophesized variety is born out in the resulting exhibition, "The American River," a limited selection of which is on view at the Philadelphia Art Alliance through September 1.

Within the diversity of images, however, Carl Belz, the director emeritus of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and one of the jurors, identifies a common thread. In the accompanying catalog, he writes, "The river emerges as a place for solitary contemplation. For many of the artists, that reverie takes place at a great distance from the river, reminding us of nature's vast and irresistible embrace; others, at the same time, bring us close enough to visually caress the river's sparkling surface or glimpse intimately the secluded pools where the fish might lie; and yet another group, I'm thinking here of the abstractionists, appear to immerse us in the river itself, surrounding us completely with its shifting light and color and its constant movement."

Belz was joined in the jury by Jeffrey Rosenheim, the curator of photography at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and Linda Simmons, a curator emeritus at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. They reviewed more than 1,600 entries, selecting 40 for the show. Augmenting these pieces are works by invited artists. By going beyond the juried pool, Reeves explains, the curators were able to mold a show that not only displayed quality work but als reinforced the theme and "strengthened the line of this interpretive look at the river," she says.

The full exhibition will be displayed at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, from October 11 through January 4. For more information about the show or to order a catalog, write: Great River Arts Institute, Dept. AA, P.O. Box 639, 52 Main St., Walpole, NH 03608; call: (603) 756-3638; E-mail: grai@sover.net; or visit: greatriver arts.org.


Reviews

Artscope, November/December 2007
Deborah Bohnert and Rachel Dayson-Levy: Lush
By James Foritano
Excerpts from Artscope November - December 2007

When I was a child in the 1950's, it seemed to my childish apprehension that the most vital genre was the "Creature Feature," when who knew what would charge out of who knew where to go where only U.S. government troops and perhaps God could follow. And, no matter how final the defeat of this plot-ravishing "thing." It would always leave behind a spore, a seed, from which, if not itself, its kin would emerge once more to throw all our normal expectations into a cocked hat.

Now that I am an adult, I search for other ways to defeat my expectations, to go behind the pedestrian scenario that we all jointly conspire to erect over that least smidgeon of daily dread. And when it does emerge, to the alert of all our senses, it has that strange beauty of the unfamiliar because less acknowledged reality lies peeping from within the more manicured, more acceptable version.

... Deborah Bohnert is another deft prestidigitator who questions different truism through her collection of toys, but is of the same "stripe" as Datson-Levy with differently subversive methods and, also a unique quality of affection. The popping colors of even the smallest toys from her lode of plastic, rubber and feathered creations are warrant enough for our attention, but dislocate and reassemble them, put them on a pedestal, enclose them in a glass test-tube, angle them just so, and their identity shifts ambiguously, even self-assertively, so that what "grabbed" our attention temporarily now holds it.

Give them backgrounds of layered acrylic textured with sinuous "crackles," floating abstract shapes composed to echo their three-dimensional plasticity, and these toys are never going back into their box at playtime's end. Instead, they dialogue with their new painterly backgrounds as awed onlooker, rambunctious participant or perhaps as an escapee regarding wistfully the illusionist frames from which they’ve dared to emerge into a world of time and consequence.

Detail Fresh Fruits 2007
Detail of Fresh Fruits #2 by Deborah Bohnert



Art New England

October/November 2007
Interior Worlds, Exterior Visions
by Shawn Hill

Karen Haas and Arlette Kayafas were pleased to find themselves co-jurors for the 2007 New England Photography Biennial at the Danforth. Haas's curatorial position at the MFA's Lane Collection and Kayafas's years as a collector and gallerist had brought them together on occasion, and it was a pleasant confirmation to find their tastes so complimentary.

...The humorous counterpoint Haas mentioned emerges in the work of Deborah Bohnert, whose amusing figurative collage cast herself as a rather wary paper doll complete with various outfits ready to be cut out and tried on. Shopping Queen Debbie has purchased an array of mismatched accessories, while Trendy and Bendy Debbie seems ready for a night on the town (despite her lack of anatomically correct features under the paper clothes).


Metro West Daily News
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Multiple visions at the Danforth
by Chris Bergeron/Daily News staff

Dorothea Lange once urged other photographers to "really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind."

...While there are many standouts, Bohnert's "Self-portrait Cut Out" series is playful and profound in equal measures. She photographs herself as a sort of paper doll accompanied by constructed cut-outs of outfits that raise interesting questions about gender, role playing and identity.

In images like "Trendy and Bendy Debbie," she gazes into her own lens and the viewer in tights and frumpy hats as if to dare us to look and decide what we're really seeing.

Lange, whose classic photo "Migrant Mother" also stared into our souls, would approve.


 

The Boston Globe
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Biennial in focus at Danforth
by Denise Taylor

... Both photographers and jurors are clamoring to either get into or to jury what has become one of the region's premier showcases for regional talent.

"This is a very, very important show," said Leslie Brown, curator of Boston University's Photographic Resource Center, who cocurated the 2005 Biennial. "It's just exciting. It's a real community builder, and a lot of people come up to see it and to see who's in it."

Ask Karen Haas, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts Lane Collection, about the range of work chosen, and the excitement in her voice is palpable. "Some of the work that we particularly loved felt very personal," said Haas, who cocurated this year's biennial with Arlette Kayafas, director of Kayafas Gallery of Boston.


The Boston Globe
Monday, January 9, 2006
Sidekick
Quick Picks by Meredith Goldstein

Skin
Skin (5 x4 x 15) Latex and Acrylic

 

An Artist by Nature

Marblehead Artist Deborah Bohnert's strangely shaped, colorful sculptures will be featured at the Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery at the Montserrat College of Art this month. The exhibit, "Out of the Ordinary", shows Bohnert's vision as an artist and psychotherapist. She says her projects, whether sculptures made from latex or simple paintings on canvas, show the interconnection of events in nature. View her work through Jan. 26th. The gallery is open today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Carol Schlosberg Gallery, 23 Essex St., Beverly,
978-921-4242. www.Montserrat.edu/galleries/schlosberg.shtml



The Boston Globe
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Calendar

Deborah Bohnert: Out of the Ordinary Art Exhibition, Montserratt College of Art, Carol Schlosberg Alumni Gallery, 23 Essex St. Beverly, 978-921-4242, ext. 1204. Free. www.montserratt.edu "Very few people understand my work, states Marblehead-based artist Deborah Bohnert on her webite.www.deborahbohnert.com and there is something slightly unsettling about her vividly colored mixed media pieces. Just take the acrylic and latex items included in her series, "Skin Wall Installation I". Many of the pieces have the bright sheen of children's toys but are rendered in misshapen forms. A reception will be held on Jan 21 from 4-6 pm.



Art New England

April /May 2005
Regional Reviews
by Shawn Hill

Skin

The exhibition title Skin refers to the luscious surfaces both artists create with viscous paint. There's sheen, a liquid luminosity to their work that complements one another and that starts comfortably from a foothold in abstraction...

Bohnert's surfaces and supports change radically, though her colors maintain a chalky whiteness. Some are shellacked on Plexiglass; others dribble over balloon or pillow shapes. The best remain the paintings in which Bohnert has made one big gesture (like an irregular, kidney-shaped pool of pink flesh tone on white.) Some have added fabric collage elements; though merely garments (a lacey sleeve, a ribbed blouse), these attachments read as fossils, suggesting a human presence.


Boston Herald
January 2005
By Joanne Silver

Show more than "Skin" deep

Dozens of balloons fill a gallery wall with a juicy cornucopia of painted, puckered forms. Slathered in color and varnish, they sprout protrusions from strange orifices. Even the balloons manufactured with Mickey Mouse ears suggest scenarios that are not G-rated. This is Deborah Bohnert's "Skin Installation Wall" -- not to be confused with the flesh, mixed pillows clustered in her "Skin Floor Installation."

..both artist' works explore paintings as a process connected to the cycles in nature and the human body. "Skin," a two person show at the Fort Point Arts Gallery through Feb 4, features art that looks at once startlingly familiar and alien, comforting and disturbing. Of course, human beings neither begin nor end with skin, and these painterly pieces hint at what lurks beneath, while still delighting in the richness of the outer covering.

A startling vision of man and nature bursts forth in Bohnert's art. The doctored balloons sport eye-popping colors along with physiological oddities. A Valentine's Day's worth of pinks radiates from the painted covers of the four round throw pillows. Found wooden boxes hold poetic pairings of objects, such as a hinged shell and a fleshy deflated balloon. Everywhere, objects hint at organisms growing and dying.

Frequently the artist reveals the outside and inside of these pieces simultaneously, as if to emphasize that both are part of a single whole. Vessels make of a skin like Fiberglass weave seem partially flayed and vulnerable. Two works on canvas -- "Heart (Flower Series)" and "Sleeve (Flower Series)" turn ruffled remnants of women's clothing into desiccated life forms, reminiscent of sea creatures washed up on a beach. Trapped in the near - monochrome of Bohnert's paintings, the white fragments of cloth have shed their original skins to take on a new life in art.


The Boston Globe
Friday, December 31, 2004
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

More than 'Skin' deep

Skin, Latex and Acrylic, Deborah Bohnert 2004
Skin (6.5 x 5 x 4) Latex and Acrylic

"Skin," at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, is two artists' takes on an old but still captivating subject -- the surface of a painting and how it can be like the surface of our flesh.

Deborah Bohnert makes strong work that consistently unsettles; it both attracts and repels, and that's a good thing. Her most recent pieces are crafted from balloons -- mostly deflated, shriveled and shrunk, dipped in or stippled with paint. She covers one whole wall with these bright, squirming objects. They bloat and pucker, yet they have a weird cheeriness. They're strange amalgams of internal organs and cartoon characters.

Bohnert also crafts mixed-media paintings, layering paint and other pigments in Plexiglas. "Mother of Pearl" shimmers like its title, catching the light and throwing it back at us, but its sheer beauty has a dark undertone in the globular form that twists just below the surface.

Bohnert carries this exhibit.

At: Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, 300 Summer St., through Feb. 4. 617-423-4299. www.fortpointarts.org



Art New England
April/May 2003
By Mary Bucci McCoy

Inner Voices
Gallery of Modern Art

...Deborah Bohnert works with paint, translucent paper, and embedded objects on and between layers of Plexiglass. The final image often feels like an allusion to nature, something perhaps viewed under a microscope. Initial familiarity fades as layers seem to separate from and then melt back into the overall image, almost as if it is being viewed is activation the work.


GoMA, Gallery of Modern Art
January 2004

GoMA presents Fresh Art

GoMA, the Gallery of Modern Art, has announced an inviting new exhibit that will be open to the public through February 29, 2004.

The Gallery's "Fresh Art" exhibit presents new works by Deborah Bohnert, Evelina Brozgul, Bernd Haussmann, Jennifer Maestre, Amy Maas, Jessie Morgan, Howard Tran and Sarah Walker.

GoMA is open to the public on Sunday, Monday and Friday from noon until 5:00. On Saturdays, the Gallery is open from noon until 6:00. Please call (781) 631-3204 for information

Artist: Deborah Bohnert
"Open Vessel" (one of an installation of eight vessels) 5 x 6
by Deborah Bohnert


GoMA, Gallery of Modern Art
November 2003

GoMA presents Deep Listening

GoMA has announced a stunning new exhibit that will be open to the public through December 31, 2003.

The Gallery's "Deep Listening" exhibit presents new works by Ahren Ahrenholz, Deborah Bohnert, Paul Cary Goldberg, Bernd Haussmann, Michele Koenig, Jennifer Maestre, Jessie Morgan, Rose Olson, Paul C. Pollaro, Gabrielle Senza and Sarah Walker.

The opening reception with the artists will be on Saturday, November 1, from
4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Please call (781) 631-3204 for information.

Deborah Bohnert, artist
Deborah Bohnert's Lilly Pad Project # 1 (12" x 12" mixed media)
is one of the many works gallery visitors will discover at the
GoMA Deep Listening exhibit opening on Saturday, November 1


Art New England

VOLUME 24 ISSUE 3 | April / May 2003

Gallery of Modern Art/Marblehead
www.galleryofmodernart.com
INNER VOICES

Inner Voices challenges viewers to connect the artist's inner world with their own. The predominantly abstract works in this group show layer materials, textures, colors, marks, allusion, and narrative, creating very different first impressions depending on which element is at the forefront. The work then invites viewers to move beyond the initial impression to look more deeply at the work and in so doing to look more deeply within themselves

The overall warm glow of the oranges and pinks is the first impression from Rose Olson's striped paintings on plywood. Looking more closely, the complexity and richness given to these stripes of color by Olson's thinly applied horizontal and vertical layers of paint reveal that within these stripes she has in fact delineated a deep emotional and meditative space.

Gesture and movement are at the forefront of Amy Maas' paintings: Crisp black calligraphic marks dance in softer fields of layered colors, creating a rich dialogue between foreground and back ground, between active and passive elements.

Deborah Bohnert works with paint, translucent paper, and embedded objects on and between layers of Plexiglass. The final image often feels like an allusion to nature, something perhaps viewed under a microscope. Initial familiarity fades as layers seem to separate from and then melt back into the overall image, almost as if it being viewed is activating the work.

1024 Days XXXXIX, Bohnert
At the Gallery of Modern Art, Deborah Bohnert --
1024 Days XXXXIX, mixed media, 12 x 12", 2002.
Photo: Jeff Magidson

Ahren Ahrenholz's sculpture begins with found objects that he imbues with disturbing narrative and psychological meaning. A child-size rocking chair encased in woven cream-colored webbing is amorphous, abstracted yet still identifiable. The emotional overtones of the piece tighten around the viewer just as the artist has obsessively woven and tightened the webbing around the chair. Like the other artists in this show, Ahrenholz rewards those who look deeper, even if it is not always easy.

-- Mary Bucci McCoy



culture in FOCUS
artsMEDIA
NOOKS OF THE NORTH
FROM LAWRENCE TO GLOUCESTER AND POINTS BETWEEN

by Raymond Liddell
Excerpted from Arts Media, Boston's monthly guide to the visual arts
June- July, 2001, Volume 5, Number 19

* * * * Disregarding prevailing taste, conventional wisdom and the dictates of an established market, the Gallery of Modem Art in Marblehead (154 Washington Street, 781-631-3204: galleryofmodemart.com) was founded several years ago as a place to exhibit contemporary, non-representational work. GoMA is located in a quaint Olde New Englande downtown that appears to have been designed by Martha Stewart, but is filled with art that you'd expect to fend in a cutting-edge contemporary gallery in New York. Indicative of the quality of art shown by GoMA are the exquisite collages of Suzanne Ulrich who is also represented by Barbara Krakow on Newbury Street in Boston and by Ivan Karp at OK Harris Gallery in Manhattan. Need I say more? The gallery represents a small, extraordinary group of artists that also includes Bernd Haussmann, Jennifer Maestre, Peter Roux, Deborah Bohnert, Evelina Brozgul, Amy Maas and Diane Ayott.

* * * * Mingo Gallery, like GoMA in Marblehead, represents a small number of artists chosen, not for easy saleability, but for the inherent quality of the work. As a result, both galleries work to create a market for the art they exhibit, instead of mounting frequent, crowded group shows to determine who and what sells. Both galleries have a personality and a point of view. Both galleries invest in their artists.


GoMA's GIFTS BY THE SEA
by Eileen Kennedy
Excerpted from Arts Media, Boston's monthly guide to the visual arts
February 15 - March 15, 2000, Volume 4, Number 6

Nestled among the historic red brick storefronts of Marblehead's main street is the newly opened Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). Like that rare piece of blue beach glass, this space is a collector's prize. If the current show of four contemporary painters and two sculptor's, "Where We Come From and Where We Go" (through March 13,) is an indication of the work to follow, artist-founder Deborah Bohnert has got herself a winner and a soon-to-be worn path to her antique door - only 40 minutes from Boston.

Jennifer Maestre's award-winning sculptures turn form and function inside out in a way that is elegant, aesthetically gorgeous and just downright clever. Her compact nest-like constructions are shaped from rubber, zippers, mesh and common flooring nails saturated in metallic colors of copper, grey, turquoise and indigo, and explicitly inspired from the form and metaphor of the sea urchin. Overlapping nail heads line the "nests" like iridescent snake scales and their protruding ring shanks create a surprisingly dense and beautiful exterior that magnetizes the viewer while protecting the "inner urchin" in the nest.

Just vaguely reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined cup, Maestre's work reconfigures functional, common objects in a way that, rather than shocking or disturbing us, invites the most delightful exhale - transforming "painful" points of nails into objects of sheer, nearly vulnerable beauty.

The other sculptor represented in the show, Howard Tran, took this writer's breath away with "Enso V," a large mixed media wall sculpture combining organic (ginko, bamboo leaves, wood) and inorganic materials. Like the two small plaster wall casts also in the show, Tran's work subtly reflects the artist's response to his early childhood in post-war Vietnam. Using the earthy, muted colors of that landscape in a tonally rich, simple composition that suggests sun, sky and horizon, Tran places three actual bamboo leaves vertically below ground, level with the horizon. It reads as a cross-sectional view of a slowly regenerating land.

This piece, along with his expressive standing figurative sculpture, "Deidre," where Tran models some areas realistically and leaves others rough and fragmented, are among the strongest in an already powerful show. Luckily for us, more of his work can be seen in a group show at GoMA later in March.

Exhibited regularly in the U.S. and Germany, Bernd Haussmann's oil paintings dominate "Where We Come From" with twenty paintings and two ceramic floor vases. Haussmann's abstract works are layered with paint and then scratched, with the result that they appear to bring with them their own history, graffiti etched in the same era as an ancient ruin. "The Beginning, the End and the Time in Between" hints at experience and time, history's foundations, as an almost tender revelation: a flowing curvilinear drawing appears in the paint on one side of the canvas as if articulating the space it shares with the canvas's other forms. Haussmann's formal painterly abilities are as powerful on wood, steel, canvas, plaster or paper.

The six painted abstract striped collages of Suzanne Ulrich bring a high note of primary color to a show dominated by muted earth tones and organic shapes. Her 1991 large oil "Blue Stripes" allows the viewer to see the progression to her more recent work. The larger, rougher stripes of the canvas, reminiscent of Jasper John's flags, have evolved into the smaller, smoother, pure color notes of a minimalist Matisse, seemingly simple yet strong. Her work, perhaps the most abstract of the show, also includes some of its most personal of artifacts - small scraps of stationery from correspondence with friends in a series that truly reflects "where we come from."

Peter Roux's series of softly-focused oils - blurred images of landscapes as if seen from a moving car or train - perhaps the just less-than perfect note in this whole show. Although technically adroit and glowing, the works seem weighted more toward production than inspiration. By essentially repeating the same imagery in each frame, we're offered no substantial innovation or evolvement within the theme. Do, though, ask to see his charcoals and pastels, stronger testimonies to the artist's skills.

The show also includes Deborah Bohnert's moody neo-expressionist oil canvas "Traces I." In it, a forest full of varied perspectives demonstrates an exciting lexicon of shape and color. There is something of the feel and spiritual power of the Canadian landscape painter Emily Carr. We'd make the drive along the ocean just to see where this landscape painter is heading. And her Gallery of Modern Art deserves kudos all around.



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