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An Embarrassment of Riches
John Haberin New York City
Virginia Jaramillo, Morgan Fisher, and Fall Abstraction
Every fall brings an embarrassment of riches, but it does not have to be an embarrassment. When it comes to abstraction, abundance can help clarify the choices.
It can mean the recovery of a woman artist nearing eighty and still in motion, Virginia Jaramillo. It can mean Morgan Fisher, an artist still working boldly within the constraints of Minimalism but also challenging them—by challenging you to count to 6. Most of all, it means the usual mess of fall abstraction, gallery profiles, and artists taking chances. If you have encountered many of them before in these reviews, so what else is new? 
Abstraction on the move
Virginia Jaramillo sure keeps moving. Her latest paintings have the scale and immediacy of pictures by an artist in her prime. You may have to recheck the list to assure yourself that she painted them all within the last year. Some build on the slim curves crossing a black field that brought her attention around 1970. Others take her in a new direction, and they seem in motion, too. But why?
They present two bodies of work, although the hanging makes no effort to keep them apart. Jaramillo trades those slim curves in intriguing colors for jagged and thicker whites. They might be pointing or darting their way into the black. The rest derive their energy from irregular fields of acrylic, with both notched and curvilinear hard edges. They have so little respect for the overall rectangle, almost like shaped canvas for Ellsworth Kelly. They also pack sharp colors and plenty of black and white.
As with Kelly, the colors run to something just off the expected—such as a rusty brown, a pale olive green, two shades of blue on the same canvas, and always off-white. Hers, though, are both flatter and brighter. One can imagine them, too, as in motion. They seem layered rather than colliding, because the same color often picks up on the far side of another. They also challenge a viewer to order the layers. Still, black almost always holds the center, while smaller fields near the corners suggest that the paintings begin with white.
Clearly visible brushwork adds to the sense of process and motion. It also looks back to Jaramillo's work from the 1960s—crusty verticals of house paint and gesso on a larger dark canvas. By the late 1970s she had shifted from that and the gentle curves, like ribbons of color or light, to drips and smears. Her return over the years to geometry brings her closer to a still older artist back in the spotlight, Carmen Herrera. It has been a good year for abstraction and often neglected women. The London gallery's new Chelsea home gives New York an overdue solo show.
Jaramillo's identity has long been in motion as well. Born in Texas and educated in LA, she left Watts in 1965 for a brief stay in Paris before settling in New York. A new friendship with Melvin Edwards, an African American with much the same geographic history, must have helped her in crossing the continent. The gallery notes other friends from her Soho years in Dan Christensen, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Bowling. Like them, she was not easily categorized as expressionist or Minimalist. She also found herself at home in a circle of mixed race, but then she, too, is hard to pin down.
In just the last year, she has appeared in shows of "Black Los Angeles" and "Black Radical Women," although her art has no obvious politics, her heritage is Mexican, and one might think of her as white. (She did not appear among Latin American women, also at the Brooklyn Museum.) Like Edwards, she also turns up in "Soul of a Nation," ostensibly about the age of Black Power, although it has plenty of abstraction and precious little to do with Black Power. Race in America is always a harsh reality and always a fiction anyway. Her work's relation to gender is not so obvious either, but also all the more interesting for its adoption of stereotypically masculine traits of big painting, big cuts, and action. As a woman, a person of color, or a painter, she can only keep moving.
Multiplication and division
Who knew that it could be so hard to count to six? Morgan Fisher makes it so, with a seemingly simple but increasingly complex abstraction. Both the simplicity and the complexity contribute to its boldness. Fisher stacks plain, bright colors in horizontal rows, in the tradition of striped or shaped canvas governed by hard edges, like Protractors for Frank Stella. The work's title alone points to painting's internal logic, as 6 × 6 × 6 × 2. Just try, though, to perform the multiplication.
Speaking of multiplying, a large room holds what look like eight distinct works, four apiece on facing walls. Each consists of staggered panels, one foot in height, of varying width but mostly long. Any one panel holds a single color from an ordinary color wheel, on wood. A row may hold at most two colors and two panels. Fisher consulted The Theory and Practice of Color, a text from 1920 by Bonnie E. Snow and Hugo B. Froehlich that he calls one of his favorite books. Here even color squares for Josef Albers would seem insufficiently rigorous.
The eight stacks belong, though, to a single painting with additional ground rules. Fisher, just six years younger than Stella, has exchanged a protractor's geometry problem for not so simple arithmetic. Each stack fills a space six feet wide and six feet tall, although no one row runs a full six feet in length. He determined the width and color of each panel by rolling dice. He took delight in how a die, too, has exactly six sides, like the face of each stack. He leaves nothing else to chance.
The reliance on a title's formula has a parallel (no pun intended) in R. H. Quaytman after Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim. Fisher, though, would have no patience for af Klint's mysticism. The work exhibits its unity and rigor in its outer stacks, with edges flush left at a wall's left and flush right at right. The irregularity of the stacks has its patterns, too. The shapes on one wall match the gaps between stacks on the other. The paired central stacks play off one another as well. They might fit together like notched machinery, and Fisher thinks of them as teeth.
If that sounds a trifle aggressive, he shares the gallery with Anna Ostoya. As in her last show, she bases her most stunning shards of color on Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, while reducing the heroine's face to blankness as her rapist, Holofernes, never could. Other kaleidoscopic compositions outline a woman's body, nearby buildings and fences, and a history of World War II. All approach abstraction, leaving the woman little more than a dismembered mannequin. Art, she seems to say, is like that when it comes to women—even at its most vivid, feminist, and joyful. Fisher, though, is in no way grinding his teeth.
Rather, he is calling attention to the gaps, like a proper Minimalist, including the four white walls and the entire room. Some stacks leave a row blank, and six rows cannot help now and then omitting a color in ROYGBIV. Where exactly is the symmetry in the central stacks, and where are the remaining two stacks on each wall that account for the title's third 6? I reread the artist's statement, well, half a dozen times without ever getting it. The collision of open spaces with objects and colors adds up regardless. Where a clear rule for Sol LeWitt leads to a messy wall painting, here a messy rule leaves a clear impression.
From the WPA to polymers
With fall openings, some galleries have the luxury to return to art historical figures, like Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. Who knew that Krasner had a shot at a WPA mural back in 1940, in part because Willem de Kooning as a noncitizen did not qualify (although Ilya Bolotowsky, a Russian immigrant, did)? And who knew that halfway decent work from Mitchell's most influential years are still entering the market? Krasner's gallery also has a peek at the jazz era, with Stuart Davis at his most abstract in black and white, while others take a shot at revising the canon—if only, alas, on behalf of men. Ralph Humphrey produced monochromes in the late 1950s with a palpable texture, at the expense of visual richness. Frank Bowling, a Brit and person of color who also works in New York, can approach Mark Rothko with his highly worked color fields or just plain clutter.
Harvey Quaytman lands a blow with shaped canvas from the 1970s, with shapes that could pass for hammers, although he prefers to call them pendulums. David Row to this day works in the idiom of that decade. His curved fields play against polygonal shaped canvas, while black spatters and abrasion play against both. Luiz Zerbini, born in 1959, crosses Op Art with Pattern and Decoration to bring his Brazilian origins to geometric abstraction. And Anthony Pearson, nearing fifty, uses Hydrocal, or gypsum, for overlapping shades of gray. Their layering can evoke vegetation or ghosts.
Mary Weatherford places single fluorescent tubes out of Dan Flavin against big brushwork out of Mitchell, as two sides of the same titanic gesture. The effect is pleasing enough regardless. What of the eclecticism of younger stars? Despina Stokou comes closest to "zombie formalism," but with a reminder of why zombies are still scary and keep coming back. She layers gesture over practically anything, including what sure looks like text. If you can never quite read a word of it, you can be sure that it concerns you.
Others aim for sheer optical activity. Chris Gallagher offers a lesson in luminosity with slim, dense, wet-on-wet bands of oil. If the color choices seem capricious, they are the all the more spontaneous and unpredictable. In Bushwick, Stephen Maine continues his pursuit of negative colors and spaces in relief, 
while Elizabeth Gourlay and Audrey Stone make their lesson about the translucency of a rubbery medium, Flashe. Trudy Benson brings a riveting complexity to her latest. Their thick patterns may still recall microchips writ large, just as later work from Benson recalls a scientist's description of curved space, also so much more.
Benson engages the space below street level, too, with her largest painting, on a partition leading a few steps down. And that takes one only through September openings. Could there yet be a shock or two left? Beverly Fishman and Maureen McQuillan have at least unfamiliar media. Fishman's urethane on shaped panels looks crisp enough from the front while reflecting its colors onto the back and adjacent wall. Her comparison of her imagery to packaging from the drug industry may not ring true for you or me, but sometimes art is a drug, too.
McQuillan pours out sheets of acrylic polymer, but they do not remain clear for long. Quintuple, sextuple, or even octuple S-shapes run down them in white ink, for the outlines of what could almost be tears. She fills in the spaces with still more ink before the polymer dries—in strange purples, yellows, greens, and blues. And then she lays down more sheets, until one can no longer guess at the layers. Panels set side by side reinforce the play between physical substance and transparency. Here, too, virtuoso handling may excuse arbitrary images, but for now I am not complaining.
Virginia Jaramillo ran at Hales through December 8, 2018, Morgan Fisher and Anna Ostoya at Bortolami through December 22, Lee Krasner at Paul Kasmin through October 27, Joan Mitchell at Cheim & Read through November 3, Stuart Davis at Kasmin through December 22, Ralph Humphrey at Garth Greenan through October 20, Frank Bowling at Alexander Gray through October 13, Harvey Quaytman at van Doren Waxter through November 3, David Row at Loretta Howard through October 20, Luiz Zerbini at Sikkema Jenkins through October 13, Anthony Pearson at Marianne Boesky through October 20, Mary Weatherford at Gagosian through October 15, Despina Stokou at Derek Eller through November 11, Chris Gallagher at McKenzie through October 7, Stephen Maine and others at Odetta through September 30, Trudy Benson at Lyles & King through October 7, Beverly Fishman at Miles McEnery through November 10, and Maureen McQuillan at McKenzie through November 11.