MichaelKate Interiors

'Geronimo,' Wallace Piat Brad Nack photos — ‘Geronimo,’ Wallace Piat
Brad Nack photos

Curator Brad Nack was looking for something creepy and scary for his latest show at MichaelKate Interiors and he may have gotten more than he expected. There’s some artistic madness going down at the furniture showroom that doubles as a gallery, making for one of MichaelKate’s boldest shows of the year.

Fans of La Luz de Jesus gallery and the pop surrealist movement will instantly groove on the very large paintings by Christopher Ulrich and his “Demoneater” series. But equally scary is Christina Tonges Korn and her spectral paintings. These balance against the more mellow works by Barbara Romain and the pop art explosions of Wallace Piatt, the only local in the show. It might be an unfair battle, two unhinged artists going up against two more “normal” ones (friends of the artists may begin debate here!), but the mix of color and scale work themselves out nicely.

"Amtrak Bath" 'THomas Van Stein Brad Nack — “Amtrak Bath” ‘THomas Van Stein
Brad Nack

Several months ago, Brad Nack brought four abstract artists to MichaelKate Interiors, each dealing in their own way with topography. After that, another quartet dealt with flight and birds. But this month’s exhibition, “Bright Lines and the Void” (through June 30), complicates matters further with a disparate selection of paintings from four vastly different artists. Thomas Van Stein’s nocturnal landscapes; John Carlander’s bold abstracts; Hilary Baker’s enigmatic yet representational work; and Norman Lundin’s witty realism — this is a conversation between four distinct personalities, and like a great dinner party, it’s worth sitting in and checking out what comes up.

Mr. Lundin comes from the grey climes of Seattle and you can see it in his paintings, as if somebody had told Edward Hopper to tone down the color and get the people out of the room. These are interiors and exteriors (sometimes both, seen through windows) honoring still moments on endless overcast and wet days. I say witty, because check out “Sun Break, Studio” which only shows its sun through a thin strip of light that defines the shadows on the window sill. The rest, from our perspective, is yet another gloomy, almost smoky day, looking out across the landscape in search of a horizon. These are the funereal rooms of Tarkovsky and Bergman, where time has slowed down, crawled, and given up. On the other hand, the entropy is so finely rendered that the paintings energize in a perverse way.

Tag: MichaelKate Interiors

Fright Night – WEIRD PAINTINGS LAND AT MICHAELKATE INTERIORS

Bright Lights, Gloomy Cities – Four Artists show together at MichaelKate