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

LAUREL HAUSLER’s “Dogtown” reviewed in The Washington Post

 

Laurel Hausler. “Midnight in Dogtown,” 2019. (Laurel Hausler)

Sunday, June 30, 2019

By Mark Jenkins

Laurel Hausler

“Dogtown,” the namesake of Laurel Hausler’s show at Morton Fine Art, is a real place: an abandoned Massachusetts town that literally went to the dogs. But it’s also a state of mind, one that has much in common with the outlook of the Arlington artist’s previous exhibition, “Ghost Stories.”

Like the earlier pictures, these feature spectral presences, mixed-media contrasts and compositions dominated by darkness. So the most surprising of the newer works is “Midnight in Dogtown,” in which a sketchy rendering of a human figure is framed by upside-down black drips and dwarfed by fields of bright orange and red.

The selection includes a few small pieces that employ found objects and encaustic, a mix of wax and pigment. More common, though, are expressionist drawing-paintings that combine pencil marks with oil and gouache. These appear vehement, yet rough in places. It’s as if Hausler leaves openings in case any spirit might seek to enter.

Laurel Hausler: Dogtown Through Wednesday at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302.

 

Available Artwork by LAUREL HAUSLER

 

Washington Post In the Galleries: JULIA MAE BANCROFT ‘Through Glass Lace’

‘Violet’s Window’, 2018, ink, gouache, pencil and oil pastel on paper, 20″x 20″

Julia Mae Bancroft

There are fewer photo transfers in Julia Mae Bancroft’s “Through Glass Lace” than in her previous Morton Fine Art show, but the weight of old photographs remains heavy. The D.C. artist’s mixed-media pictures are almost all in black and shades of gray, with just occasional touches of pale pink or green. Bancroft conjures the past as drained of color but crowded with memories.

Texture is as crucial as image to Bancroft’s style. The pictures incorporate pulp, fiber, papier-mache and hand-stitched embroidery, and they are on sheets of paper mounted to stand slightly away from their backdrops. The layers represent what the artist’s statement terms “a glass lace screen” while “piecing together a fragmented narrative.”

That narrative doesn’t seem to be autobiographical. Some of the photo imagery is older than Bancroft, evoking the 1960s and much earlier times. The same is true of the artist’s technique, notably the needlework. The reminders of traditional women’s crafts ground Bancroft’s ghostly reveries in real-world labor.

~ Mark Jenkins, 2019

Julia Mae Bancroft: Through Glass Lace Through May 22 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302.

‘Thinking of Falling’, 2019, ink, gouache and collage on paper, 22″x 11.5″

Remaining available artworks by JULIA MAE BANCROFT can be viewed here on our website and are also accessible for viewing in person at Morton Fine Art.

Morton Fine Art

52 O Street NW #302, Washington DC 20001

Hours: Wednesday – Saturday : Noon – 5pm

Sunday – Tuesday : by appointment

NATE LEWIS featured in The Washington Post

In the galleries: A visual rallying cry against gun violence

By Mark Jenkins March 30 at 9:00 AM

 

Nate Lewis

One of Nate Lewis’s works on display at Morton Fine Art. (Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art)

The photographs of nude African American bodies employed by Nate Lewis aren’t exactly blank slates. The local artist leaves some bodily details — eyes, fingers, nipples — in the pictures he transforms for “Hidden Tensions,” at Morton Fine Art. But Lewis complements the intact bits of flesh with intricate markings, cut into the black-and-white pictures and or added with white ink. The symbols suggest fabric motifs and ritual body paint, but the artist calls them “unseen tensions of the past, present and future.”

The patterns are both additions and deletions, as emphasized by one of the show’s most recent pieces. In “Palpable Memories II,” a ghostly figure is carved into a D.C. street shot from 2016’s Inauguration Day. Where the single-figure pictures are highlighted by white backdrops, this scene is crowded with people from across the political spectrum. And thus, of course, not-so-hidden tensions.

Hidden Tensions: Nate Lewis Through April 11 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Click HERE to view available artwork by NATE LEWIS

The Washington Post reviews KESHA BRUCE ‘Weapons for Spiritual Warfare’

Until I Break Skin, 2018, dyed/painted fabric on un-stretched canvas, 96″x 96″

The artworks in Kesha Bruce’s “Weapons for Spiritual Warfare” are a form of ancestor worship. Each one of the tradition-rooted pieces in her Morton Fine Art show is “an answered prayer,” writes the African American artist, who divides her time between the United States and France.

Most of these collage-paintings are small and consist of four rough-edged fabric squares daubed with simple geometric forms. The X, Y, + and # shapes are elemental, but rendered loosely to give evidence of the artist’s hand, as well as offer a sense of spontaneity. The largest and most complex are “The Sky Opened for Her,” which is cross-shaped and fringed with streamers, and “Between Starshine and Clay,” whose top third consists of overlapping black squares. The former resembles a ceremonial robe, while the latter evokes a sweeping view of a village under a nighttime sky — a universe conjured from tattered scraps and unstudied gestures.

Reviewed by Mark Jenkins, March 1, 2018.

Kesha Bruce: Weapons for Spiritual Warfare Through March 7 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Please follow the hyperlink to visit our website  for all available artworks by KESHA BRUCE, and contact us here at the gallery for additional information or acquisition details.

 

The Washington Post features JULIA MAE BANCROFT a review of ‘Mending Moments’

In the galleries: Julia Mae Bancroft stitches the past to the present

By Mark Jenkins December 28 at 4:00 PM

“Mamie’s House,” on view through Jan. 4 at Morton Fine Art. (Julia Mae Bancroft/Morton Fine Art)

 

It’s not only the predominantly gray palette that gives Julia Mae Bancroft’s artwork a ghostly feel. The mixed-media pictures in her Morton Fine Art show, “Mending Moments,” feature old-timey houses and interiors. Arrayed inside are women in long dresses, sometimes with faces transferred from vintage photos. The Virginia-bred D.C. artist graduated from the Corcoran College of Art and Design only a few years ago, yet seems fixed in an earlier era.

The “mending” in the show’s title refers in part to Bancroft’s use of embroidery. She stitches as well as draws and paints, working thin, white strands into compositions that sometimes also incorporate layers of paper pulp. The threads can be abstract elements or represent literal things, such as human hair. The vertical strings that cloak “Moonlit Overcast” suggest both hanging moss and the mists of time.

The effect can be spooky. The subject of “Sitting in Her Empty Chair” has a indistinct face and a clawlike hand. “Reverie,” the most 3-D piece, is built upon an iron grate with a tombstonelike shape. Bancroft, it appears, doesn’t merely ponder the past. She actively disinters it.

Julia Mae Bancroft: Mending Moments Through Jan. 4 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

 

Available artwork by JULIA MAE BANCROFT as well as her artist bio with statement can be found by following the highlighted link to Morton Fine Art’s website. Please contact the gallery for additional details.

VONN SUMNER’s “Bread and Circuses (and Walls) reviewed in The Washington Post

VONN SUMNER, A Big Fat Beautiful Wall, 2017, 80″x65″, acrylic and collage on linen

Vonn Sumner

• The Washington Post Sunday
• 1 Oct 2017
• by Mark Jenkins

A Californian whose ancestors lived in that state when it was still part of Mexico, Vonn Sumner is not one of the “build the wall” crowd. His response to that chant is the series of paintings in “Bread and Circuses (and Walls).” The biggest piece in the Morton Fine Art show, “A Big Fat Beautiful Wall,” stacks bricklike blocks of bright color, each rectangle graced with a traditional Mexican decorative paper appliqué. The painter also depicts barriers that almost hide the carnival-style festivities behind them.

Updating a phrase that dates to Juvenal, who satirized life in Rome almost two millennia ago, Sumner paints jesters in colorful, bellfestooned hoods. Many of the performers have loaves of Mexican-style sweet bread balanced on their heads. The clowns look sideways at the edge of the pictures, skeptically avoiding the viewer’s gaze. They don’t want to join the circus parade.

Sumner paints in a realist style, deftly employing modeling and shadow to simulate roundness and depth. Yet he intentionally simplifies, notably by using areas of intense, simple hues that suggest both comic books and color-field painting. The effect is to invoke universal forms — things that will outlast the biggest, most beautiful wall. Vonn Sumner: Bread and Circuses (and Walls) On view through Oct. 3 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Click HERE to view available artwork by VONN SUMNER.

ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY reviewed in the Washington Post

In the galleries: Digital and traditional media join forces

By Mark Jenkins

Museums

Review

June 30, 2017

 

 

Rosemary Feit Covey’s “Gingko,” mixed media on canvas, on view at Morton Fine Art. (Rosemary Feit Covey/Morton Fine Art)

Rosemary Feit Covey

Nature teems in Rosemary Feit Covey’s large mixed-media paintings. Hundreds of pink and red fish school in spirals, and uncountable yellow ginkgo leaves cover most of a deep blue background. Yet the Washington artist has doubts about the fecundity she depicts. Her Morton Fine Art show is titled “The Planet Is a Delicate Thing.”

Covey’s skills include woodblock printing, whose carving technique she incorporates into low-relief pictures that are partly engraved and partly painted. This array’s epic, “Black Ice,” is an immersive eight-panel tableaux; it fills the gallery’s longest wall with blue-and-white ice floes on a darker-than-wine sea. The dramatic Arctic oceanscape, like the polar bear on the adjacent wall, was inspired by a trip to northern Norway.

The artist doesn’t directly portray ecological disasters, although this show includes one of the bone-pile pictures she has exhibited at Morton before. But global warming menaces the polar scenes, and those fish are fleeing the oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout. Covey’s responses to such disasters are both expansive and exquisitely detailed.

Rosemary Feit Covey: The Planet Is a Delicate Thing On view through July 9 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Please click HERE to view available artwork by ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY.

VICTOR EKPUK’s solo “These Moments” reviewed in The Washington Post

Washington Post ~ In the galleries: Powerful messages that require few words

By Mark Jenkins May 25, 2017

 Victor Ekpuk’s “Still I Rise,” acrylic on paper, on view in “These Moments,” through May 31 at Morton Fine Art. Some of the pieces in the D.C. artist’s show were inspired by his recent four-month residency in his homeland of Nigeria. (Victor Ekpuk/Courtesy Morton Fine Art)

Some of the pictures in Victor Ekpuk’s “These Moments,” like his earlier ones, feature ideograms derived from Nsibidi, an ancient African writing system. But the most forceful piece in the Morton Fine Art show contains just one symbol: a crosshairs bull’s eye over a faceless man’s heart. The figure in “Still I Rise” is on his knees with his hands up, one in a gesture of surrender, but the other clenched into a fist. The D.C. artist is thinking not of his native Nigeria, but of places such as Ferguson, Mo. 

Other pieces were inspired by Ekpuk’s recent four-month residency in the land of his birth, where he was struck by local idioms in which “head” refers to a person’s mind or mood. That resulted in several sculptural paintings, all titled “Head” plus a number, on shaped wood panels. Ekpuk has a strong graphic sense, and snipping his images to their essential outlines gives then even more punch.

In the nearly all-red “Head 2,” Nsibidi characters fill the face and neck, suggesting someone stuffed with thoughts. Yet there’s less text in these artworks than in previous groupings, and it’s sometimes pitted against elementary geometry, such as the horizontal stripes of “Head 7.” Executed mostly in black and red, with deep blue as an occasional counterpoint, these drawings and paintings are strikingly direct. “Still I Rise” is the only one that could double as a protest placard, but all are as immediate as street posters.

Victor Ekpuk: These Moments On view through May 31 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. ­202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Click HERE to view available artwork by VICTOR EKPUK.

MAYA FREELON ASANTE’s “Impermanence” reviewed in Washington Post

 

In the Galleries

by Mark Jenkins

December 23, 2015

 

 

Maya Freelon Asante
Dyed, crumpled tissue paper is the basis for the works in Maya Freelon Asante’s “Impermanence,” but that fundamental material takes many forms at the Morton Fine Art show. The Baltimore artist’s “Evidence/Nothing” series consists of twisted paper forms mounted on wood. Some of the other pieces are prints derived from wetly inked paper spun on a flat wheel. A few compositions incorporate old family photos, a celebration of personal heritage but also an expression of grief over the death of a child.

All of the works hang on the gallery’s walls, but some are partly sculptural. In addition to the ones made of tangled tissue, “Shattered/Whole” arrays seeds and shards of glass atop its pink-spattered paper. Yet Asante demonstrates that 3-D elements are not necessary to effect a sense of depth. The show’s standout is “Dark Matter,” a monoprint whose green and blue forms conjure motion, distance and gem-like facets. It appears both liquid and crystalline, impermanent and eternal.

 

Shattered Whole, 30″x20″, tissue paper, ink, glass, seeds and resin

 

 

Dark Matter, 58″x44″, spinning tisue paper ink mono print

Impermanence: Maya Freelon Asante On view through Jan. 5 at Morton Fine Art, 1781 Florida Ave. NW. 202-628-2787. mortonfineart.com.

Click HERE to view available artwork by MAYA FREELON ASANTE.