Dean Jensen Gallery
The thing about group exhibitions is that they can often drift into pure eclecticism, a random selection of work slightly more organized than the assortment of things in your own living room. Not so with “Great Impressions IV: An Exhibition of Contemporary Prints" on view at Dean Jensen Gallery. Pulling together works from the gallery’s inventory, Jensen’s curatorial acumen brings these pieces, which are strong on their own, into a select but satisfying exploration of important contemporary artists and their forays into printed media.
Though not a narrative series per se, four prints by Richard Bosman make a strong suggestion for a story about murder at sea. Fiction writers, check out these prints and sharpen your mental pencils. In Full Moon, a wooden rowboat contains two figures, one prone and nearly unseen, the other with fist raised and sleeve billowing like a character out of Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. The floating body bobbing among waves in Adrift I and Adrift II is similarly cagey about its backstory. There is plenty of room to fill in the blanks while admiring Bosman’s skill in producing these softground and spitbite etchings.
Bruce Nauman is intriguingly cryptic in Verso Recto, a stark black ground punctuated by a row of thin white arches. The combination recalls the severe eloquence of Robert Motherwell but Nauman is a more prosaic. The arches on the bottom seem like windows or some such things, but on the top, slight details turn the spaces into fingers with thin joints and wonky fingernails. From whence have these fingers come and to whom do they belong?
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Other works on view follow more conventional types of subject matter like portraits, including Lucian Freud’s lovely IB. This etching is man’s profile resting quietly on a surface, the dense shadows framing his sculptural face and waves of hair. Monumental portraits are offered by other significant 20th-century figurative painters Alice Neel and Alfred Leslie.
An additional exhibition downstairs, “Gérard Sendrey: Constantly Inconstant,” showcases a variety of styles of portraiture by this French artist famous in the world of self-taught and outsider art.
Through June 14 at Dean Jensen Gallery, 759 N. Water St.
