MERON ENGIDA HAWKE | The Washington Post

ART

In the galleries: Artists imagine red in images from brutal to banal

Also: Honoring Japan’s creative culture and craftsmanship, an inventive exhibit allows viewers to be hands-on collaborators and engage with the objects on display, and an artist explores her Ethiopian identity.

Review by Mark Jenkins

May 26, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Meron Engida Hawke

“Ashenda Girl 3” by Meron Engida Hawke in her exhibit “Hummingbird.” (Meron Engida Hawke and Morton Fine Art)

Painter-collagist Meron Engida Hawke lives in D.C., but her pictures convey viewers to her birthplace, Ethiopia. Rendered in a flat, naive style that emulates her original homeland’s aged murals, the works in Engida Hawke’s Morton Fine Art exhibition portray women, children, animals and a traditional agrarian lifestyle where little things matter. Those include teff, the traditional grain whose individual grains are minuscule, and the tiny creature for which the show is named, “Hummingbird.”

Printed pictures of those birds, invoking a fable about their brave attempt to fight a fire with mere drops of water, are collaged into paintings made with acrylics and oilstick. Also incorporated are yarn, fabric, imitation pearls, rock-patterned wallpaper and — in two small sculptures — teff stalks that mimic human hair. The artist’s fresco-like style is functional yet poetic, much like the activities it is used to depict. Whether the subject is a noble lion, long a symbol of Ethiopia, or a humble gristmill, Engida Hawke’s pictures possess a strong sense of place.

Meron Engida Hawke: Hummingbird Through June 9 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. By appointment.

Available artwork by MERON ENGIDA HAWKE

ANDREI PETROV | The Washington Post

In the galleries: Landmark show lauds two iconic artists

Also: A multi-artist exhibit spans nearly a century of the Black experience in America; two artists deal with the war in Ukraine indirectly with personal and esoteric approaches.

Review by Mark Jenkins

April 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Leonets & Petrov

No signs of war are evident in Jaroslav Leonets’s and Andrei Petrov’s recent work, but their paintings respond to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Leonets’s landscapes depict a land of rustic beauty, barely touched by mankind but achingly vulnerable. Petrov’s landscape-influenced abstractions refer to an earlier period in the region’s history, yet were sparked by the Russian onslaught.

Leonets is a Kyiv resident who began painting rural Ukrainian scenes before the full-blown war began. His Amy Kaslow Gallery show, “Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain,” features nine impressionistic oils made between 2019 and 2022. They’re painted primarily with sunny hues, yet with areas deepened by shadow. The majority of them feature bodies of water alluringly splashed with reflected light.

Andrei Petrov’s “Fugitive Sun,” in his exhibit “Footprints in the Snow.” (Andrei Petrov/Morton Fine Art)

Similar highlights characterize most of the oils in Petrov’s Morton Fine Art show. But as indicated by the show’s title, “Footprints in the Snow,” the reflections play on white fields rather than blue lakes or rivers. Petrov is a D.C.-born New Yorker whose suite of pictures was inspired by his grandfather’s 1915 escape from a Siberian labor camp, a flight that took him to China and eventually the United States. Petrov is partly of Ukrainian heritage, and the Russian assault motivated him to revisit this chapter in his family history.

Both artists apply pigment thickly, but after that, their methods diverge. Leonets’s technique is as traditional as his imagery; clouds and cliffs alike are rendered with thick but loose gestures. Petrov applies layers of color that he then cracks and partly removes. Many of his pictures are defined by fissures that suggest the collision of tectonic plates. This signature move is visually striking, but also thematically suggestive: The fractures suggest breaks in the timeline or lives shattered by history. Where Leonets’s landscapes appear pretty but threatened, Petrov’s abstractions conjure centuries of ruin and loss.

Jaroslav Leonets: Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain Through May 7 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, 7920 Norfolk Ave., Bethesda.

Andrei Petrov: Footprints in the Snow Through May 7 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302.0Comments

KESHA BRUCE | The Washington Post

KESHA BRUCE, Memory of Matala, 2022, 60″x48″, mixed media textile collage work on canvas

Kesha Bruce

Review by Mark Jenkins

September 30, 2022

The title of Kesha Bruce’s show at Morton Fine Art, “Take Me to the Water,” is an homage to Nina Simone’s performance of that gospel song. Bruce identifies with water, “a force that follows its own paths and forms its own shapes,” according to the gallery’s note. Ironically, the collagist-painter lives in one of the nation’s driest states, Arizona, where she is director of artist programs for the state’s arts commission.

Bruce reports that her palette has gotten sunnier since she moved from the Midwest to the Southwest, yet landscape is vestigial in her work. The artist instinctively assembles scraps of wrinkled fabric that are painted — and sometimes overpainted — to craft patchworks that may suggest but never literally depict the natural world.

A leaflike form dominates the top of “La Sirene,” and the mostly green “Like Florida Water” has a cool rainforest vibe. But for every “Memory of Matala,” whose blue blocks above tan ones evoke sky overhead earth, there are several pictures whose intricate, quilt-like compositions appear purely abstract. The real subject of this artwork is transformation: cutting, painting and pasting pieces of secondhand textiles into arrangements that are unexpected and distinctively Bruce’s own.

Available Artwork by KESHA BRUCE

ETO OTITIGBE | “Materiel Remains” reviewed in The Washington Post

Eto Otitigbe

Review by Mark Jenkins

June 24, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

“Dr. Nova,” by Eto Otitigbe, in the exhibit “Materiel Remains: Consider This a Blueprint, a Series of Blueprints.” (Eto Otitigbe)

At first glance, the Eto Otitigbe paintings at Morton Fine Art don’t seem to have much connection with his best known ventures, which are public sculptures. But the swirling, inky facades of the artist’s “Materiel Remains: Consider This a Blueprint, a Series of Blueprints” are inscribed with intricate designs that have an architectural quality. These half-hidden forms do suggest blueprints, albeit for purely theoretical structures.

Otitigbe, who teaches sculpture at Brooklyn College, generally paints on valchromat, a variety of colored plywood introduced about 25 years ago. The artist buries the substance’s bright hues under mostly black paint, which contrasts the lines engraved by a computer-controlled process. The cleanly cut patterns are as precise as the applied pigment is loose and smeary.

The artist is a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, and his paintings do allude indirectly to hidden African American history. But they can also be seen as embodying the hidden structures that underlie a seemingly disordered universe. Trained as an engineer at MIT and Stanford, Otitigbe imposes structure even as he indulges painterly intuition.

Eto Otitigbe: Materiel Remains: Consider This a Blueprint, a Series of Blueprints Through June 28 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.

LIZETTE CHIRRIME reviewed in The Washington Post

Lizette Chirrime

Review by Mark Jenkins

Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT

“Somewhere on Earth” by Lizette Chirrime. (Lizette Chirrime and Morton Fine Art)

Mozambican artist Lizette Chirrime makes art by stitching together scraps of secondhand fabric and other found materials. Although this sort of patchwork is usually considered humble, Chirrime’s themes are heroic and even cosmic. Among the pieces in her Morton Fine Art show, “Rituals for Souls Search,” is “Somewhere on Earth,” in which textile strips coalesce into a sort of globe. Most of the narrow ribbons flow from one side of the tapestry to the other, but the ones that approach the circle bend into an orbit as if warped by a black hole’s pull.

More typical of Chirrime’s compositions are those that center on human figures, in two cases identified as single mothers. One of the solitary matriarchs is positioned above a photo of a woman’s face and outlined in multiple series of roughly parallel red stitches. Equally expressive is “The Boy Who Stopped the Snake,” in which the child who clutches a brown serpent is a silhouette of hot-colored tatters against a backdrop of blues and greens.

The poses in these tableaux are meant to be celebratory, and reflect the artist’s overcoming her traumatic childhood. “I literally ‘restitched’ myself together,” explains her statement. The use of castoff materials is an ecological statement and the imagery is often spiritual, but the essence of Chirrime’s art is autobiographical.

Lizette Chirrime: Rituals for Souls Search Through May 17 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.

Available Artwork by LIZETTE CHIRRIME

ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY’s solo “Descartes Died in the Snow” reviewed in The Washington Post

Art

Review

In the galleries: Uncovering life’s fragility amid ecological losses

Artist’s works are an enduring reminder of environmental crises within a global consciousness

By Mark Jenkins

Contributing reporter

March 18, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Artist Rosemary Feit Covey’s “Stained Grass” incorporates her vision of nature at risk. (Rosemary Feit Covey and Morton Fine Art)

Covey’s “Blossoms Fall II.” (Rosemary Feit Covey and Morton Fine Art)

Somewhere in most of Rosemary Feit Covey’s recent artworks are woodcut prints, detailed renderings of birds, bones and butterfly wings. But the zoological imagery can be deeply submerged in compositions so layered that they verge on being relief sculptures. The South Africa-born local artist’s “Descartes Died in the Snow” show, named for one of her mixed-media pictures on display at Morton Fine Art, both depicts and simulates nature’s fecundity.

The largest piece, and one of the oldest, 2017′s “Black Ice” is a monumental painting of a glacial scene stretched across eight vertical canvases in the manner of a traditional Japanese screen. It is simpler and more direct than many of these artworks, yet shares several qualities. It’s nearly monochromatic, portrays ecological threats and mixes customary artistic materials with shredded plastic, a substance that exemplifies mankind’s intrusions on the natural world.

Inspired in part by the organic networks generated by fungi, Covey fills her pictures with repeated organic forms, whether the animal skeletons of “Broken Earth” or the firefly-like pinpoints of “Panspermia III.” The latter is among the show’s most colorful works, but its many hues are buried in a complex array that appears black and white from a distance. The colors are subordinate to the whole, as are the recycled plastic mixed with pigment, or the tiny black magnets that hold in place the myriad collage pieces. Covey’s vision is of nature at risk, yet nonetheless growing abundantly and every which way.

Rosemary Feit Covey: Descartes Died in the Snow Through March 31 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.

Available artwork by ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY

OSI AUDU’s solo exhibition “A Sense of Self” reviewed in The Washington Post

Osi Audu’s “Self-Portrait with a Yoruba Hairstyle” in the exhibit “A Sense of Self.” (Osi Audu/Morton Fine Art)

Osi Audu

By Mark Jenkins

January 7, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Especially when rendered with gleaming graphite, Osi Audu’s hard-edge geometric abstractions evoke high-tech machines. But “A Sense of Self,” the title of the Nigeria-born New Yorker’s show at Morton Fine Art, suggests he has something else in mind. Nearly all the pictures are designated as self-portraits, and often streamline the shapes of West African masks. Audu’s inspiration is the Yoruba idea of “outer and inner head,” according to the gallery’s statement.

The show is divided primarily between monochromatic drawings, executed in gray graphite and black pastel, and brightly colorful paintings, mostly in two contrasting acrylic pigments. Audu distills the forms of masks, headdresses and hairstyles to planes, angles and curves, and positions them on white backdrops that emphasize the images’ seeming three-dimensionality. It would make sense for the artist to translate such pictures into sculpture, and in fact this show is set to include two painted-steel pieces that seem to be closely related to the paintings. (The sculptures didn’t arrive in time to be seen for this review.)

The colors and shapes are usually presented as stark dualities, but not always. “Self-Portrait After Dogon Bird Mask” features four hues rather than two, and the graphite areas in the black-and-gray drawings are made of free, densely overlapping strokes. While inner and outer are elsewhere tidily juxtaposed, the graphite’s intricate textures are intriguingly in-between.

Osi Audu: A Sense of Self Through Jan. 15 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.

Available artwork by OSI AUDU

KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN’s solo exhibition “Water Ribbon” reviewed in The Washington Post

Museums Review

In the galleries: Probing our relationships with living systems

By Mark Jenkins October 1, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

“Water Ribbon” by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is a vertical composition that’s 7½ feet high. (Morton Fine Art)

“Arch 3″ by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann has a strong central focus that departs from the artist’s usual style. (Morton Fine Art)

…Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is the most conventional of the five participants, at least in her choice of media. The Washington artist paints, usually on paper and often on a mammoth scale, with acrylic pigment and sumi ink. The ink links Mann’s style to historical Chinese painting, as does her nature imagery. Yet the crowded, layered pictures are mostly abstract. Mann begins by pouring pigment to make random patterns, which are then amended and extrapolated, partly by collage.

That synthesis — of flowing and improvisational with hard-edged and precise — yields tableaux that are dynamic and distinctive. The two Mann panoramas in “Empirical Evidence” — the larger almost 12 feet wide — are among the show’s highlights.

Anyone smitten with these sweeping pictures can easily find more, if not quite so expansive, examples at Morton Fine Art. The biggest offering is the title piece, “Water Ribbon,” a rare vertical composition that’s 7½ feet high. Many of the other pictures are, unusually for Mann, square or nearly so. Although they still suggest landscapes, such pictures as “Arch 3” have a stronger central focus than is typical of the artist’s style. Rather than meander every which way, Mann’s latest water ribbons coalesce into dazzling wholes.

Empirical Evidence Through Nov. 13 at Hamiltonian Artists, 1353 U St. NW.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann: Water Ribbon Through Oct. 6 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302.

Available Artwork by KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN

LIZ TRAN reviewed in The Washington Post

“Mirror Three” by Liz Tran combines drips, spatters and ink on wooden panels with equal measures of abandon and precision. (Morton Fine Art)

Liz Tran

by Mark Jenkins,

May 21, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Seattle artist Liz Tran drips and spatters candy-colored paint and ink on wooden panels with equal measures of abandon and precision. The abstract pictures in her Morton Fine Art show, “The Webs Installed by Our Dreams,” offer vigorous spontaneity and robust compositions, the latter often inspired by Rorschach test inkblots administered to her when she was a child. Yet minor tweaks to Tran’s formula yield very different effects.

Most of the paintings are rectangular and rendered on white backdrops. Even the loosest of them seem focused on a middle point, but that centeredness is accentuated in the two pictures on circular panels. Adding a colored background, especially the black of “Ornament 7,” also makes Tran’s free gestures more cohesive. So does moving the pictorial activity to the top of the frame in “Bluescape.”

One other painting offers a fruitful variation. “Big Bang 3” is hardly out of place in this selection, but its oscillating, concentric forms suggest something quite different from a Rorschach test inkblot: a Hindu or Buddhist mandala. Rather than one person’s untidy reveries, the picture evokes an orderly cosmos.

Liz Tran: The Webs Installed by Our Dreams Through May 27 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.

Available Artwork by LIZ TRAN

LISA MYERS BULMASH “The Home Inside My Head” reviewed in The Washington Post

Congratulations to LISA MYERS BULMASH for the rich review of her solo exhibition “The Home Inside My Head” in today’s print edition of The Washington Post by Mark Jenkins. (Arts & Style Section 12/27/20)

Lisa Myers Bulmash

Also spurred by pandemic-era exile from everyday life, Lisa Myers Bulmash conceived a Morton Fine Art show “The Home Inside My Head”. The Seattle artist combines found and personal objects into 3-D collages that conjure both African American history and her family’s own story. The pieces juggle the antiquarian and the immediate to express what Bulmash’s statement calls “a Black and female viewpoint”.

One series, “Rare & Exquisite,” places oversize models of endangered butterflies atop maps of regions of the United States collaged from Colonial-era (and thus not entirely reliable) charts. The effect is to correlate the threatened species — affixed with heavy railroad spikes that evoke hard labor –with Black people whose place in this country has always been at risk.

Examples of another antique tool, the wooden washboard, serve as frames in the “Bought and Paid For” series. The washboards hold books and ovals made of twine, which enclose overlapping transparencies of family photos. The pictures depict various old structures, including houses, and children at play. Again, Bulmash contrasts rough materials with fragile beings.

It seems apt that another piece is based on a torn piece of old sheet music repaired by kintsugi, the Japanese technique of using gold to both accentuate and exalt the cracks in a broken vessel. Bulmash’s assemblages can be seen as a bid to mend history.

Click HERE to read the review in full.

On view by appointment at Morton Fine Art through January 6th, 2021. Located at 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001.

(202) 628-2787 (text or call)

info@mortonfineart.com

http://www.mortonfineart.com

Available Artwork by LISA MYERS BULMASH

• 

• 

• 

• 

•