Recent Press and Reviews

	NYC December 1 – January 29, 2005

	From The New York Times, January 14, 2005 `NYC,' DFN Gallery, 176 Franklin Street, TriBeCa, (212) 334-3400, through Jan. 29. This selection of New York City-scapes by more than 40 painters is uneven but has many good things, including: a picture of the Columbia University green from 1975 by Rackstraw Downes; a small, Whistleresque study of office building windows by Alex Katz; a dreamy vision of a Coney Island roller coaster by David Levine; and a finely detailed, overhead picture of an intersection painted in egg tempera by Douglas Safranek with the tender exactitude of an early Renaissance master. (Ken Johnson)

	From NY Press, January 12, 2005 NYC \| Through Sat., Jan. 29. It's not conceptually challenging. It doesn't present edgy artists or new subjects, offer old masterpieces or innovative materials. DFN Gallery's "NYC" exhibition is simply a presentation of drawings and paintings that look at New York—our home. Walking around the gallery, you'll come across moments you've experienced. In street scenes like Ben Aronson's expressionist Down Lexington, the towering gray avenue is briskly painted with its thin slice of pale sky above, and its gnarled, aggressive traffic rushing down on you below. Then there's Olive Ayhens' From the Underground, with its funky, outer-borough, raised train platform in the foreground, and off in the distance, the glamorous spires of Manhattan. Wish You Were Here, a painting by John Hardy, depicts the infamous Tribeca restaurant Teddy's. The street angle chosen highlights the city's unorganized geometry of spaces and solids, curves and concrete, weird decor and alluring ads. Dan Witz's painting [Brothers] Deli glows in darkness, focusing our eyes on the bright, busy facade of signage—the corner deli seen as a nourishing beacon. There are several exceptional watercolors, such as Washington & Fourteenth Street by Frederick Brosen. Capturing the delicate color and visual harmony of cobblestone streets and detailed, 19th-century brick buildings, this work allows us to fully appreciate scenes like this...ones we pass affectionately, yet rarely have the time to stop and admire. In the back of the gallery is the second sphere [by Christopher Evans], this one 24 inches in diameter, which features a view from the top of the former World Trade Center's north tower. We see the south tower, lower Manhattan and New Jersey, and as we round the spherical painting, we go uptown, then out into Brooklyn, and back around to the south tower. The technical achievement alone is impressive, but the artist has also recorded a view now lost forever. Though the show is quaintly nostalgic with its bridges, roller coasters, crime scenes, family strolls, overgrown industrial parks, and plants dying in windows, the images give the familiar streets we take for granted a new frame of reverence. (Julia Morton)

	From M: The New York Art World, January 2005 NYC, DFN Gallery The visual hyperactivity of New York City has long fascinated painters. Pushing beyond the postcard clichés, however, this group exhibition of fifty-six paintings (by some forty-four artists) manages to stand out for its incongruities; unlikely framings, visual distortions, misty atmospherics, and in particular, a compelling night vignette and two striking 360º spheres [by Christopher Evans]. The spheres serve as icons for the show; spectacular objects of curiosity that depict the sun setting over the Hudson River and the New Jersey horizon, while coral colored light illuminates the tops of soaring office buildings. The device works as a guarantor of authenticity. As the visitor walks around the painted ball, the full wrap-around effect of the image takes hold. It’s like looking at a planetarium projector. The other sphere is even more outlandish: a 360º view from street level in Times Square, with exuberant crowds caught in a blur. The most successful paintings in the show are those that transform banal scenes into striking, graphically sophisticated images. For example, Ben Aronson’s Down Lexington depicts skylight at the end of a canyon of buildings along Lexington Avenue, in which the light bounces harshly off a line of car-tops and hoods, muting color with its glare. The viewer has the sense of hovering just feet above the busy avenue, looking down at the dull yellow taxi roof of a cab disappearing into the bottom right corner of the painting. The bustling scene is parsed by the oblique x and y axes of the center line and a pedestrian crosswalk. How often have city dwellers been struck by these near symmetries, brief epiphanies of almost balletic balance in the chaos of traffic? The effect is, no doubt, more difficult to achieve in a literal medium (like photography), which records too much of of everything. Here, we can appreciate why painting — like rock and roll — can never die. (Joel Simpson)

	From The New York Observer, December 20, 2004 The City as Artists’ Muse: N.Y.C. Before and After 9/11 by Mario Naves The motivation behind NYC, a group show at DFN Gallery, is to offer testimony to the city’s role as a “muse and model” for contemporary artists. It does, I suppose, though it’s hard to take in the paintings and photographs – over 50 pieces by 45 artists – without feeling that the exhibition’s more of a memorial than a celebration. The organizers had to be aware that 9/11 would inform their efforts. With a number of the included painters having participated in the studio program at the World Trade Center, how could they not be? And yet I wonder if they realized the extent to which the events of that day haunt the art. An unfair conclusion, perhaps: Not a few of the pictures were created before Sept. 2001. I suspect the location of DFN, a short walk from Ground Zero, underscores a mind-set altered by terrorism. Nonetheless, the urban romance inherent in much of the work has been tempered by history. Sometimes it’s filled with awful portent. Tom Birkner’s Skyline II, Flatiron (1990), deftly rendered in black and white enamel, depicts the southern tip of Manhattan. The Twin Towers, though seen in the distance, are the linchpin of the painting and given definition by abrupt and exacting strokes of silvery gray. An unmistakable anxiety informs Mr. Birkner’s superlative picture – an otherworldly calm, too. It’s impossible to look at it without a chill traveling up the spine. Study for Violet Fog (1995), a painting hardly bigger than an 8 ½-by-11-inch sheet of paper, confirms that Alex Katz, notwithstanding his gifts for working on a large scale, is more incisive and approachable when keeping things small. Olive Ayhens’ From the Underground (2001) is a portrayal of elevated subway tracks that somehow manages to be both apocalyptic and joyous, and may be the single finest picture this peculiar artist has committed to canvas. Rackstraw Downes’ Columbia University (1975) is marvelously severe in the artist’s paint handling, and mercifully absent is the eye-stretching theatrics typical of his work. In Night Skylight (2004), Jacqueline Gourevitch renders architectural miscellany as a kind of Cubist reverie, all shifting angles and tawny browns. There are other worthy pieces on display that bear discovery – not least among them, works by Robert Selwyn, Peter Schroth, Rick Finkelstein, Ben Aronson and Joan Mateu. Unfortunately, the finest pictures of New York City created in recent years, John Dubrow’s majestic views of Manhattan as painted from a perch in the World Trade Center, didn’t find their way to DFN. There is, in fact, a lot of unmajestic art in NYC. Would that a less charitable curatorial hand had whipped it into shape. Still, the good stuff is attuned to the city – its rhythms, grit and exasperating energy – so you forgive the exhibition its fair share of clunkers.