2023 WINTER FESTIVAL ABSTRACT PAINTERS
Sharon Booma
For nearly four decades, Sharon Booma has been a remarkable talent within the world of contemporary abstraction. Booma’s mixed-media compositions transfigure personal artifacts and natural materials into the principal elements of a profoundly expressive and highly individualized visual language. Reflecting on her works, Booma said: “My painted surfaces reflect human experience; beauty in its imperfection, mystery, and spirituality. While my instincts are to make rational and objective choices, my work remains open to the element of controlled chance –caught between physicality and delicacy, rooted in emotion, memory, and imagination.”
Dan Christensen (1942–2007)
With work in virtually every leading American museum and innumerable important private collections, Dan Christensen is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. In 1990, the great critic Clement Greenberg anointed him as “one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.” Greenberg viewed Christensen as an exemplar of “post-painterly abstraction” — a term he coined for the movement that followed Abstract Expressionism in modernist progress towards what Greenberg regarded as a “pure art” that would eschew subject matter, spatial illusion, and an artist’s persona in favor of revealing the “truthfulness” of the canvas.
Enrico Donati (1909–2008)
In a career that spanned seven decades, Enrico Donati is known for creating enduringly beautiful works in a variety of media that are heralded for their provocative, complex, and mysterious nature. An important aspect of Donati’s art reflects his interest in alchemy, the ancient proto-science based on the transformation of a “base matter” into gold, or to purify or perfect certain materials. Donati worked both additively and subtractively, using materials like ground quartz and sand to give his surfaces their sculptural textures. Regarding his work, Donati wrote, “As an artist, I was always involved with the aesthetic values of alchemy and magic, and in their influence on the creative imagination of man….”
Andrew Fisher
With a successful interior design career spanning fifty years, Andrew Fisher is highly acclaimed for his unbridled imagination and unique artistic sensibility in creating “drop dead chic” fantasy interiors. Seamlessly blending his love of metal and sculpture, Fisher elegantly combines steel, cut paper, acrylic ink, precious metals, and other mixed media, which results in stunning paintings that employ radiant, cascading rhythms of gridded texture and mesmerizing plays of light and color. Fisher’s extraordinary compositions shine with a lustrous gold patina that allow the viewer an ecstatic opportunity for deep, meditative reflection. He lives and works in San Francisco and San Miguel de Allende, MX.
Colliding
Emphasizing seductive surfaces, nontraditional materials, and the use of luminescent colors, Jimi Gleason stands among today’s most important practitioners of West Coast Minimalism. The artist’s profoundly meditative paintings instill contemporary abstraction with references to the dramatic glimmer of Cibachrome photography, as well as the beautifully distorted edges of Polaroid film by means of a layering procedure that derives from printmaking techniques. Dragging iridescent acrylic pigments along tautly-stretched canvases, he surrounds radiant planes of color with peripheries whose folds and runnels ground the work’s vaporous atmospherics in the here and now of direct physical experience.
Henry Jackson’s thorough mastery of color and composition rank him as a highly regarded contemporary abstract expressionist painter. His paintings evince both a let-loose freedom and a finely disciplined process that creates enduring beauty for the eye as well as the mind. While they reference the figure, Jackson’s works resist specificity or realism. Of this intentional lack of identifiable feature or form, Jackson says, “Shapes emerge and perish almost simultaneously within their environment, and this revealing does not come easy…. What remains from this exhaustive struggle are agitated, irreducible forms. This tearing down of the figure is where I begin to see truth.”
Emily Mason (1932–2019)
One of America’s foremost non-representational painters, Emily Mason spent more than five decades exploring her distinctive vein of lyrical, luminous abstraction. Robert Berlind said of her in Art in America: “Mason works within the improvisational model of Abstract Expressionism, though notably without angst or bravado.” Her oil on canvas paintings are distinguished by a sense of intriguing intimacy combined with uncompromising, though gentle, intensity. Born and raised in New York City, Mason graduated from Cooper Union. In 1956–58, she was awarded a Fulbright grant for painting in Italy, and went on to enjoy a highly-esteemed career. Mason shared her long life with her husband, artist Wolf Kahn.
Brian O'Connor (1958–2022)
For more than 30 years, surrealist painter Brian O’Connor has created phantasmal scenes of illusion and mystery. Fictional characters act out sociopolitical narratives of the somewhat absurd. With every brush stroke as a metaphor, his paintings become a language of emotion, memory, and ideas, rendering figures within a range of realism; from classical, to caricature, to cartoon. “O’Connor is a gifted realist painter whose increasingly dark vision continues to expand as he adds to his narrative of millennial observations…What O’Connor does in his work is pose questions about our complicity with the forces of degradation that seem to increasingly govern our fate and compromise the quality of play and poetry of our children,” said Diane Armitage of THE Magazine.
Jack Roth (1927–2004)
Over a career that spanned four decades, Jack Roth built on his early success as an Abstract Expressionist movement to cultivate a remarkable body of Color Field painting. He began working in San Francisco in the 1940s studying under Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Clyfford Still, and continued through to the 1980s when his work was represented by the prestigious gallery Knoedler & Co alongside the art of Diebenkorn, Calder, and others. In addition to his career in art, Roth was also a longtime professor of mathematics, and published two books on calculus. Of his unique career, Roth said, “I am looking for a mathematical explanation of art…. The art of painting is a search for reality; a search for understanding.”
