In her third show at the Bowery Gallery, Adrianne Lobel has worked from the plein air paintings she did last summer in a mobile home park. This new work has become scaled up, hard edged, geometric, and abstract with color that conveys space and light. The show is on view Sept 2- Sept 29, 2018.
When one enters the show one is immediately taken by the scale of the Lobel paintings. The paintings are LARGE, colorful and exert an unusual presence. They literally transform the space of the gallery.
Orange House, 6 ‘x 12’
Adrianne Lobel comes to painting from the unique experience of stage design. She spent 35 years as an award winning stage designer for Broadway, Off Broadway, and Opera.
The aesthetics learned through this former career has a great influence on her painting. She says, “It’s about scale. In the theater you are designing space for life size people to walk around in. You are given a volume and space to work with. With painting you have to create the volume and space yourself”.
Pink House, 6 ‘x 12’
She has been asked why there are no people in her paintings. She says as a set designer she was used to the actors walking into her “paintings” . So now for her the people who are looking at her paintings become the people in the paintings! The scale of the works perfectly accommodates this interaction.
Green House with Road, 24″ x 30″
Why trailer parks and mobile homes? Lobel loves the colors and simple shapes. She compares this subject matter to Morandi and his containers.
The paintings have a Giorgio de Chirico quality, too, and even Lobel will admit that there is something very surreal about the strange simple shapes of the Mobile homes. She is quick to point out that her interest in this subject matter is purely aesthetic but people can read into it whatever they want.
Morandi Still Life_1955
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For the current show, Lobel did plein air paintings on site in mobile parks in up-state New York. Then she took the paintings back to her art studio and developed large paintings ( 3′ x 6′). Some of these large paintings were painted on even larger canvas ( 5′ x 7′) and then from these Lobel lifted out cropped sections, focusing specifically on the windows. These became her exciting “window series” in the Bowery show.
Yellow Square, 36″ x 36″
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Telephone Pole, 36″ x 36″
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Blue Shadow, 36″ x 36″
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A side note: Lobel says that having an art studio has made a big difference in her painting practice. It’s a big transition for a painter to go from working on-site to working in the studio with the plein air paintings. For this show ALL the works were created in the studio. So the challenge, she says, is how to scale up the works.
Day for Night, 36″ x 36″
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Orange Roof, 36″ x 36″
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Lobel’s work has been compared to David Hockney and Richard Diebenkorn. But when asked about influences Lobel cites Wayne Thiebaud. She says he is her hero!
David Cohen of Art Critical wrote this of her last show at The Carter Burden Gallery:
“Tacking the banality of such delights as storage units, tract housing, parking lots and the like – the suburban sublime – painter (and former set designer) Adrianne Lobel occupies a hybrid aesthetic space somewhere between realist melancholy and utopian abstraction that’s as unsettling and ambiguous as the environment with which she contends. Often working at a larger than expected scale for such quotidian observations and insisting on upbeat palette and streamlined compositions for what actually betokens neglect an decay, and yet in credible witness rather than whimsical elaboration, she tests the boundaries between dejection and joy.
Adrianne Lobel will be at Bowery Gallery on Saturday, Sept 29 at 3:00 pm for a conversation about her current exhibition Mobile Homes. All are invited!
530 WEST 25TH ST, 4TH FL, NEW YORK, NY 10001 • 646.230.6655
TUESDAY – SATURDAY • 11 AM – 6PM
Gallery hours are 11am to 6pm Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, please contact the gallery at 646-230-6655 or info@bowerygallery.org
**DIANE DRESCHER
