Pure color appears to pool, flow, pulse or simply mark the boundaries of a void in the latest retrospective of American abstraction at Pazo Fine Art’s Kensington location. “Living Colors” offers a single item by each of 10 artists, half of whom spent at least part of their careers in Washington. Seven of the pictures were made before 1976, but the selection ranges from a print of nested yellow squares by Josef Albers, patriarch of color-field art, to a brand-new minimalist canvas by Matthew Feyld.
The first artwork visitors encounter is the darkest and boldest, and among the largest. Howard Mehring’s 1964 “Magenta Double” is one of the D.C. artist’s collage-paintings, assembled from strips cut from canvases painted with heathered allover patterns. Two magenta columns, confined by thick black bars, float on a dark green field, the hard-edge geometric forms softened by the stippled color. The picture is essentially flat, yet beckons the eye into seeming depths.
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Equally symmetrical and even bigger is Thomas Downing’s 1972 “Split Possession,” which arrays dots in seven colors (including white) on a bare-canvas expanse. The precision is gently offset by the edges of the dots, which bleed ever so slightly into the fabric.
Among the other highlights are paintings by Helene Herzbrun and Vivian Springford in which free-form blue areas are exquisitely aqueous, and Terry Parmelee’s “August,” whose overlapping orange circles oscillate on a yellow backdrop. The titles of this work and Dorothy Fratt’s “Bird on a Wire” hint that the pictures are portrayals of the natural world, however highly stylized. Most of the show’s artworks, however, distill the universe to nothing but color, shape and texture.
Living Colors Through May 18 at Pazo Fine Art, 4228 Howard Ave., Kensington. pazofineart.com. 571-315-5279.
Pressing
The four sprawling 3D pieces in “Pressing,” a two-artist show at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, are symbolic landscapes that represent environments both organic and man-made. They also convey history lessons, albeit of different sorts.
Local artist Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is known for intricate collage-paintings that overflow their boundaries. She invokes her Taiwanese heritage with sumi-ink painting that combines improvisational abstraction with renderings of flowers and plants. These include the four most often depicted in traditional Chinese art: cherry blossom, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum.
Mann’s assemblages in this show also incorporate mosaics of stones, tiles and small bits of glass, whose hardness contrasts the many fragile paper elements, including streamers that drape onto the floor. These vines and tendrils join with the other elements to conjure overgrown gardens, teeming with wild possibility.
There is soil in Rena Detrixhe’s “Red Dirt Rug,” but it nurtures no plants. The large floor piece appears as tidy as Mann’s artworks are unruly, although grainy edges reveal that the installation is indeed made of dirt. The Kansas City artist has stamped decorative motifs, inspired by a residency in Oklahoma, into the red powder. Among them are native plant and bird species and art deco motifs from Tulsa buildings.
Under the rug, in a sense, are such deliberately obscured events as the Trail of Tears, during which Native Americans were driven from the Southeast to Oklahoma, and the 1921 white supremacist massacre of Black residents in Tulsa’s Greenwood District. Detrixhe’s creation will eventually be swept up, but the fraught historical bedrock that supports it will endure.
Pressing: Rena Detrixhe and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann Through May 19 at Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, 12001 Market St., Reston. tephraica.org. 703-471-9242.
Maureen Minehan
The landscapes in Maureen Minehan’s “There and Back” investigate the vast realm between very little and nothing at all. The D.C. photographer’s Multiple Exposures Gallery show often features images of a single man-made object — a house, a pier, a lifeguard’s chair — in a natural setting. The solitude is emphasized by darkness, ephemeral light or mists that bid to obscure the scene altogether.
The vignettes, all observed on Maryland’s Eastern Shore or the Delaware coast, are stark and mysterious, although there is a humorous interlude: two tiny people, the only humans to inhabit any of the photos, sit on a beach next to a banner that proclaims, “yoga.” The word is legible, but much of the image is beguilingly soft. That’s characteristic of these pictures, which include several for which Minehan probably used long exposures to blur breaking surf into a cottony white-blue expanse.
The subtle textures weren’t all captured through the lens. Minehan prints on fibrous paper and sometimes uses computer manipulation to incorporate gently hued brushstrokes derived from watercolor painting. These meld with the photographed skies to accentuate hazy clouds and diffused sunlight. The effect is faint, but in pictures of mist, shadow and emptiness every small addition is world-shaping.
Maureen Minehan: There and Back Through May 19 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.
Anna U Davis
It’s nice that the title of Anna U Davis’s Brentwood Arts Exchange show, “Road to Recovery,” is reassuring, since many of the images are harrowing. The Swedish-born D.C. artist is a breast cancer survivor whose depictions of medical procedures are jarringly vivid, even if her renderings are far from realistic. In “The Sting,” a technician injects wasps into a woman’s breast as the patient’s face, pressed against the edge of the picture and turned toward the viewer, contorts into a scream.
Davis shows her work frequently in the area, so her style may well be familiar. She paints in a simplified, cartoonish manner and contrasts her subjects with mosaic-like areas of collaged cut-paper pieces. Davis’s characters are gray-skinned people she calls “Frocasians,” inspired by her own interracial family. Her bright-colored pictures tend to be large, and the ones in this group have black backdrops that make the figures pop, or sometimes appear about to engulf them in darkness.
Among the more disturbing paintings is “Waitingroom,” in which five men sit on a couch, all of them attached to IVs and dripping blood from their feet. Several of the others portray a solitary woman, whether burning with internal fire seemingly ignited by the pills that surround her or taking refuge under blue strands that spray from a shower head. In Davis’s telling, even moments of respite can cascade with pain and fear.
Anna U Davis: Road to Recovery Through May 18 at Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave., Brentwood. pgparks.com/brentwood-arts. 301-277-2863.
