Paintings by Claude Lawrence at Venus Over Manhattan gallery (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
Maybe it’s something in the springtime air — all the new growth and wild nature — but fantastical landscapes and creatures seem abundant in galleries this month. While Sanam Khatibi’s uncanny scenes feel like memento mori transplanted to a land between life and death and Joy Curtis’s strange anatomies reimagine life as we know it, Hell Gette’s brightly colored worlds combine art history with a Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Goyette and Florencia Escudero delve into technicolor imaginations as Julia Bland, Claude Lawrence, and Annette Wehrhahn saturate the gallery spaces with the soaring colors of their abstract works. — Natalie Haddad, Reviews Editor
Claude Lawrence: Reflections on Porgy & Bess
Chicago-born and Sag Harbor-based artist Claude Lawrence has a strong love of jazz and that passion endows his large abstractions with a clear, rhythmic quality. There are hints of well-known Modernists, like Picasso and Pollock, in his all-over paintings, but it’s Lawrence’s ability to bury his ideas — cloak may be a better word — in these canvases through hand-drawn lines, self-aware forms, and distinct colors that makes the work really fascinating, and he achieves it all with a sense of improv that always retains a layer of enigma.
This two-gallery show on Great Jones Street is a refreshing mix of familiarity and innovation. The paintings focus on the classic Gershwin musical Porgy & Bess and its lyricism, a favorite artistic mode of his. “Summertime” (2022) takes its title from the famous song and Lawrence’s painting is an embrace of large yellow, blue, peach, white, and red.
My favorite quote by Lawrence is one in defense of abstract art: “Many jazz artists supported social issues by playing for huge crowds and raising money for the civil rights movement, the music didn’t have to be about the issues of civil rights, music could be in the service of these issues, and I believe the same of art.” The potential for change in unexpected ways is very much present in this show. — Hrag Vartanian
Venus Over Manhattan (venusovermanhattan.com)
39 and 55 Great Jones Street, Noho, Manhattan
Through May 4
