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While art galleries on the East End often offer memorable juxtapositions and dichotomies in terms of exhibit tone and content, the current exhibitions at Tiffany’s in East Hampton and the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett provide contrasts that are as dramatic as might ever possibly be imagined.
The exhibition at Tiffany’s, the venerable jewelry institution, features recent works by Bettina Werner, whose unique use of colorized salt in creating elegantly textured minimalist reveries has earned her the international title of “The Salt Queen.” Titled “Crystals of the Winter Sea,” the show includes works that function on two distinct levels: Their understated monochromatic stylishness allow the pieces to stand on their own; and they create an interesting visual complement to the expensive baubles and jewels that fill the display cases beneath the paintings.
Beyond this superficial relationship, there is also the historical import of salt itself, which, much like diamonds and gold, has throughout the centuries shaped social, economic, religious, and political developments around the globe. At the very least, as the author Mark Kurlansky once noted, it’s the only rock that people eat.
Working throughout her career using colorized salt crystals, Ms. Werner conjures gentle and subtle organic environments that are invariably peaceful, but nevertheless fraught with a physical measure of energy created by her confident balance of hue and textures. As a result, the pieces contradict what seems to be the dominant minimalist principle of filling space by erasing it, instead allowing the textured surfaces of the works themselves to create definable vistas that illuminate hidden rhythms and melodies.
This is particularly apparent in pieces like “Salt More Precious Than Gold” and “Silver Salt Construction,” in which streams of languorous movement within the compositions become more apparent during extended viewing, creating undulating patterns that ebb and flow from somewhere just beneath their pebbled surfaces.
In other paintings, such as “Tibino in the Sand” or “Female Lady Bug,” these rhythmic elements become even more pronounced as black circles painted over the background serve to more immediately produce a sense of depth while also creating a hypnotic sense of contrapuntal movement between the foreground and background colors.
The exhibition of paintings by Bettina Werner, “Crystals of the Winter Sea,” continues through February 28 at Tiffany’s in East Hampton.
Meanwhile, a few miles down the road and conceptually light years further away, the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett is presenting an exhibition of rather edgy and provocative works mostly featuring nude images and titled “Salon des Refuses.” The title is drawn from the famous incident involving the Paris Salon in 1863, which eventually lost its legitimacy after refusing to exhibit around 3,000 works of art, among which were Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe” and Whistler’s “Girl in White.”
In the 1860s, those artists were unjustly isolated from the only viable commercial opportunities of the time; for the Amagansett exhibition, the curators were looking specifically for those works that the artists wouldn’t otherwise exhibit (either for reasons of personal propriety, good taste, or because no other gallery would show them).
Interestingly, much as the original exhibit opened the avant-garde art world to a wider audience, much the same could be said for this exhibition, in that prurience often serves as something of a magnet for society as a whole. In this case, due to the sign in the gallery window reading “Over 18 Years of Age Only,” neighbors who had never ventured inside had already been seen visiting the space by the day of the opening.
Actually, while there are a number of visually startling works that might arouse prudish ire, such as Evan Thomas’s “Greetings from the Fabulous Hamptons” or Samantha Ruddick and Nathan Best’s “Date Night,” in point of fact, the age restriction is primarily due to one particular painting in the exhibition, Jim Gingerich’s “Somebody Already Broke My Heart,” which has a sex act graphically depicted as its central image.
Other than that particular image, the exhibition defies the notion that there is any overarching pornographic or graphic theme to the works on view. Having said that, a number of pieces are singularly arresting for their approach to the visual elements of the human body, such as Daniel Schoenheimer’s “Fuel,” or another of Mr. Thomas’s works, “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Others, such as Will Ryan’s “Sarah’s Big Stick” or Karyn Mannix’s “Give In to Your Desires,” are more mysteriously erotic rather than leaning to the pornographically prurient.
“Salon des Refuses” continues at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett through January 31.
on Jan 19, 2010