GAMUT: FIVE ARTISTS: curated by Kathleen Cullen

The term "Gamut" is used to express the means by which the entire range of qualities can be represented. This virtual exhibition presents a variety of contemporary expressions of color, line, form and style through two and three dimensional space. In this show,  Anne Hieronymus, Nicki Marx, Bobbie Moline-Kramer, Gregory Steel and Martin Weinstein run the gamut as they explore the power and vibrations of visual phenomena as they interact with one another in a digital gallery with the illusion of 12 foot high ceilings and 250 running feet of wall space.

Anne Hieronymus

Hieronymus's large and curious colored pencil and gesso drawings on paperare based on her own collages: debris fields of torn and repurposed paper decorations, printed wrapping paper, stickers and broken up press-type. Like Kandinsky's paintings we have the illusion of floating in a cacophony of mysterious spaces, colors and letters where we can feel the joy and the struggle of creation. Like the Futurists, Hieronymus captures the dynamism and energy of the modern world - sweeping away notions and replacing them with the energetic celebration of the abstraction of typeset and contemporary ephemera.  There is chaos and improvisation. But like the universe, there is a hidden geometrical organization and a perpetual balance between what is and is not.

Nicki Marx  

Nicki Marx is a master conjuror as her artwork is ritualistic, spiritual, and rooted in a desire to create a greater, organized whole from the chaos of nature.  In Marx's Center Series, colorful feathers (legally sourced) and Mica chips (quarried by the artist) are materials that are meticulously placed to create luxurious images and unique representations of thoughts, the cosmos and/or desires. The hypnotic patterns created by the hundreds of discrete elements become at once a meditative practice on the part of the artist and imparts a sense of wonder for the viewer. These artworks are at once icons or portals to a higher spirit and also border on color field painting, substituting paint strokes with feathers and mark making with sheer pieces of translucent stone.

Martin Weinstein

There is an epic grandeur in even the smallest paintings by Martin Weinstein.  A rainbow in the clouds, the edge of a flower petal, the subtle dance of brushwork becoming at once the object and its opposite. Weinstein's paintings reference the earth and cosmos in perfect harmony. He achieves this meeting of the inner and outer worlds due to his technique of painting on 3-5 interlocking sheets of clear acrylic over a period of months to years to produce holographic paintings isolating layers of time, space, emotion, morning and evening. The psychology of time and the emotion of place are rendered in the final 3D composite image creating an experience of vast depth. The clarity of the work only becomes apparent with the joinery of each incomplete translucent layer recording only a part of the visual story. Seen together as overlapping panels, the optical illusion of reality is perfect, yet slid away, one from the other, each acrylic panel holds only a titillating fragment of the whole. 

Bobbie Moline-Kramer

In Moline-Kramer's installation All That Remains, a symbolic family tree is represented by 11 square panels depicting various bird spirits corresponding to the artist's own family members. A wood burning technique for the tree branches, a melted graphite gesso rub for the bark, along with exquisitely fine brushwork and gilding, lend this artwork a Renaissance technical classicism and a sense of timeless history. This community of birds, separated by their individual panels yet united by the common tree that supports them, are visually interdependent. Since the beginning of the global COVID-19-pandemic in early 2020, values like solidarity, community, and social cohesion have significantly gained importance and in this contemporary sense, is all that remains.

In her more recent paintings, Bobbie Moline-Kramer moves from precise representation to non-objective art with a subtle bridge between the two glimpse as an eye or part of a face behind a whirlwind of brush marks exploring different subjects with urgent colors to create a space for being. 

Gregory Steel

Gregory Steel, with a doctorate in philosophy works with the minimalist precepts of Eastern aesthetics, manifests theoretical concepts and presents the intangible.  Out of heavy metal, Steel creates graceful weaving forms that defy gravity.  Although each piece is self-referential in their deft contrapposto, Steel's sculptures also describe larger spaces beyond their own materiality, rendering previously unseen realms.  Steel's welded steel sculpture made from I-beams deserves major attention because of the graceful movement and poise in spite of its solid, rigid origins. A tension and a stress with paradoxical attraction, repulsion, yet nimble as a thought, Steel's seemingly simple forms contain and manifest multitudes. 

                                                                        --Kathleen Cullen, curator, critic and gallerist of 40 years in New York City