ARTICLE | Now at New York’s Galleries, ‘Everything in the World’ and More
March 23, 2024 - Mario Naves for The Sun
Now at New York’s Galleries, ‘Everything in the World’ and More
By Mario Naves
Friday, March 22, 2024
“Janice Biala: Paintings, 1946-1986,” an exhibition curated by Jason Andrew at Berry Campbell Gallery, fills out a byway of American modernism with expansive and, at moments, head-snapping aplomb. Biala (1903-2000) was the sister of an undersung New York School painter, Jack Tworkov, the inamorata of the novelist Ford Madox Ford, and the student of Edwin Dickinson, a painter of uncanny power and ghostly portent. This is the fullest accounting of Biala’s work mounted at New York City.
As an overview, the Berry Campbell show is bumpy in momentum — there’s a lot of ground covered here — but, then again, the momentum never flags. A significant chunk of the gallery is dedicated to canvases painted after an extended stay at Paris. “I’d have no use for Paradise,” Biala wrote to her brother, “if it wasn’t like France.” She hung with the in-crowd while living at the City of Light, and their influence was decisive, particularly that of Matisse.
Among the most striking pictures are a suite of interiors painted during the early 1970s, each of which imbues a strain of intimisme with a brash and distinctly American sense of scale. “Pompeii Interior” (1972) offers a gutsy juxtaposition of finely tuned details and brusque swaths of color, while “Homage to Goya” (circa 1975) is a tour-de-force of oblique patterning and the color black employed with rare acuity. “Paintings, 1946-86” is peppered with such moments, and if those don’t qualify it as a must-see, then I don’t know what does.
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