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New York Galleries Focus on Beautiful Painting: Karen Wright

By Karen Wright

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- Beautiful painting is alive and well, in New York City at least.

Painting and beauty as concepts had been so debased in the light of thrusting avant gardism that it is a relief to see it back on the scene and in such good form, too.

Jorg Immendorff is creating his last few pictures. A victim of Lou Gehrig's disease he is close to death. When I visited him in Duesseldorf last May, he had to be taken off his life-support machine to talk to me. He's paralyzed from the neck down and his assistants do everything to keep him alive while working on the paintings at his direction.

In the case of his paintings currently at Michael Werner in New York, he's producing sublime work. One walks into the main gallery space and is surrounded by large canvases filled with an indomitable spirit and poeticism.

Rather than having a single central composition, the pictures are built up in a fragmentary way. They are collages of paintings built from elements drawn from different sources. There is a homage to Sigmar Polke, the ghost of Joseph Beuys and references to earlier sources such as Caspar David Friedrich.

The viewer doesn't need to get all the references -- historical, political and personal -- to experience the sheer aesthetic pleasure of the works. Because of Immendorff's need to articulate the paintings to his assistants, these paintings are clearer in their narrative then his earlier work and no less touching.

Bubble Man

The pictures are dryly painted with little perspective. The artist (or at least his spirit) is omnipresent, diving into a large red tunnel, asleep in a bubble or as a skeleton with a monkey, a motif Immendorff has often utilized.

My favorite is the man asleep in the bubble, an image so ethereal that it's almost impossible to see until one takes the time. Around him, the monkey keeps watch, an upside-down tree is almost reminiscent of Georg Baselitz although painted in a quasi- Hogarthian style. The background flecked with color, engaging with the starry constellation, created by a man who knows he soon will still be part of it.

In Chelsea, at Andrea Rosen, are recent paintings by Gillian Carnegie, the young British painter nominated for the Turner Prize two years ago. This is a painter in search of a style and a subject matter. She experiments with many and, sadly, none of them really seem to come off.

Worst for me is the yellow-on-yellow ``Yellow Wall'' (2006), which is reminiscent of 1950s French paintings you sometimes see in the corner of provincial museums. A close second is ``Belle'' (2006), a painting of the artist's rear end and now a signature work. Yawn. With prices ranging from $30,000 to $90,000, her pictures aren't cheap.

Say It With Flowers

Also in Chelsea, at the Dillon Gallery, is a show of watercolors by the American painter Ed Baynard. He is best known for his paintings of flowers and this show, dedicated to floral still lives, illustrates why he has works in the collections of MOMA and the Metropolitan.

Glowing stained-glass-like colors saturate the large watercolors and illustrate how simple motifs can mean so much more. Baynard acknowledges his artistic debt to Giorgio Morandi, and David Hockney's lyrical drawings, yet these have their own very individual voice.

Baynard's flowers are not simply flowers but portraits redolent of the full realm of human possibility. Erotic, seductive or sometimes evil, there is the full range. My favorite is a large purple flower with a blowsy pink peony and some foliage and, just in case it was too pretty, some nasty looking thorns as well.

Basking in intense light, the works are pinned simply on the wall. This is a show to wallow in and look forward to the bulbs about to emerge in the garden.

Jorg Immendorff continues at Michael Werner through March 24. Click on http://www.michaelwerner.net/ . Gillian Carnegie runs through March 10 at the Andrea Rosen Gallery. Click on http://www.andrearosengallery.com/ . Ed Baynard continues at the Dillon Gallery through March 3. Click on http://www.dillongallery.com/ .

(Karen Wright is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Karen Wright at karen@karenwright.org .