A Few Recent Standouts, NYC

 Rebecca Purdum at the Resnick-Passloff Foundation

 Rebecca Purdum

Rebecca Purdum (detail)

 Emily Berger at Odetta

Otis Jones at Jack Hanley

Knox Martin at Hollis Taggart

Joan Mitchell at David Zwirner

David Novros at Paula Cooper

 Matt Phillips at Hollis Taggart

R.H. Quaytman at the Guggenheim

Don Voisine at McKenzie

REBECCA PURDUM at Tilton

Rebecca Purdum, Installation view, Jack Tilton Gallery, 2011

In her first New York exhibition in about five years, Rebecca Purdum is showing a magnificent group of new paintings at Jack Tilton, through November 5, 2011. The ten paintings in the show are mostly smaller scale works, with only one piece, a large horizontal diptych from 2008, approaching the scale of her best known previous work. The smaller scale, if possibly diminishing the wow factor of the work, does not diminish the concentrated presence of each painting -- the palpable sense of the artist's touch in every inch of the surface -- her total engagement with the most sensuous aspects of her materials. Applying paint with her gloved hands, Purdum slowly builds supple fields of close-valued color to achieve a soft hum that draws one closer. The surfaces are rich accumulations of interactions and encounters over time, with thicker and thinner, oily and matte areas mingling into a dusky soup that is at once ethereal and utterly physical. Her early swirling atmospheres have over the years become more and more still, more and more content to simply be.

Rebecca Purdum, After Colossus, 2010, 40 x 32 inches, oil on panel

Rebecca Purdum, Hourglass (yellow), 2011, 32 x 23 inches, oil on panel

Rebecca Purdum, Ripton 98, 2010, 40 x 32 inches, oil on panel

Rebecca Purdum, Blue Square, 2011, 60 x 60 inches, oil on linen

Rebecca Purdum, Ripton 92, 2009, 14 x 12 inches, oil on canvas on panel

REBECCA PURDUM at Dartmouth

Rebecca Purdum, Static, 2005, 108 x 72 inches, oil on canvas

Rebecca Purdum, Passenger, 2003, 72 x 144 inches, oil on 2 canvases

Rebecca Purdum, Ripton 77, 2008, 16 x 16 nches, oil on board

My first encounter with the work of Rebecca Purdum was her first show at Jack Tilton in 1986 -- when Tilton had just recently taken over the charged 57th Street space after the death of Betty Parsons. Thinking now about that show, it is easy to conjure the sensation of entering, in that mid-'80s climate, the first show of a very young painter who was already deeply tapped into an elemental engagement with the painting process and tradition -- who was not playing strategy games or asserting a stance, but making the most direct and substantial paintings I had seen in a long time. She painted lush darkly colorful abstract works with her hands on a huge scale -- paintings that were powerfully moving and instantly venerable. A few years later, in what seemed like utter disregard for her "career", she relocated to Vermont, where she still resides. During the past almost 25 years she has shown rarely and exclusively with Jack Tilton (not a bad gig) while forging her way deeper and deeper into an encompassing symbiosis with her process, and with painting as an entity. Remarkably, the longer she lives in the country, the tougher her paintings get. The sensate clouds of swirling color that characterized those earliest pieces have evolved into stark undulating fields of raw sensation -- pure paint and surface -- ecstatic touch.

The Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College will be presenting, from September 29 - October 25, what looks to be a Rebecca Purdum mini-retrospective that highlights some of the toughest early works and is heavy on large recent work. From the catalogue I just received, this looks like a knock-out show of haunting enigmatic paintings that confirm Rebecca as a singular and important (still young) painter who has sustained a rare depth and focus over a quarter century.

In 1997, I was honored to curate a show of Rebecca's paintings at Marywood University. Click here to read the catalogue essay. And click here to read a wonderful lecture/statement by Rebecca from Middlebury College, 2007.