Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gammons's set for Long Day's Journey stunningly evokes an abstract dream world. Mary's ladder leads to a very physical dream world of morphine in an upstairs room, but even the ground-level activities of this family take on a nightmarish eeriness. The backs of the four chairs are conspicuously unmatched and resemble the outline of a coffin. The set may be too aesthetically pleasing to fit Mary's description of her cheap home, but that in fact only increases our sense of her delusions...
...late modern American painter -- chiefly, the work of Jackson Pollock -- with his interests in Oriental art. Marden has made intense and complicated images out of this dialogue. His internal argument about his sources is settled, and the show is an exhilarating vindication of the expressive reach of abstract art: an argument for beauty...
Marden admired Jasper Johns -- a critic in the '70s brusquely but memorably wrote off an abstract twin-canvas picture by Marden as "Jasper's Painting with Two Balls, without the balls." And like Johns, he worked in a mixture of oil paint and wax, a false encaustic that gave his surfaces both substance and an inner glow, as if light were working its way through layers of slightly dusty translucency. You thought of it as skin. Marden was a brilliant colorist, in a very tuned-down way. His warm grays and brick reds, his low thick blues and his blocks...
...course, an enthusiasm for calligraphy guarantees an artist nothing. For decades, America has been full of bad abstract painting based on Chinese and Japanese ideograms -- it goes with wind-bells and Bay Area Zen. If Marden's work avoids that cliche, it is because of his accommodation with Western gestural drawing -- specifically Pollock's -- in its speed, amplitude of space and openness to chance. In these paintings you see Marden thinking about Pollock, rather slowly. Marden's black, groping line offers a kind of schematic reduction of Pollock's all-over...
...Brice Marden: best abstract painter of his generation...