When Ki Smith visited Tom Wolf’s studio, he said, “I like these. I would show them. When would you like to show?” He reacted to Tom’s unique paintings, which combine digital photographs with acrylic paint, sheets of Plexiglas, and transparent, colored urethane.. The results have luminous color and deep space, while still affirming the surface of the object and being rooted in real-world experience—works that many observers react to with the word “beautiful.” Ki imagined a show of Tom’s small paintings in frames he makes,—but the idea of filling two floors of the Ki Smith Gallery with small framed paintings seemed like too much, so Tom proposed that he invite some artist friends to show works alongside his. The exhibition, “Beauty: Tom Wolf and Friends,” is the result.

 

The In Memoriam section of the exhibition pays tribute to artists who unfortunately are no longer with us. Together these works continue the dialogue between abstraction and representation found elsewhere in the show.

 

Louise Fishman

Duncan Hannah

Jane Kaufman

Willy Lenski

Elizabeth Murray

Walter Robinson
 

Fernando Ruiz Lorenzo’s paintings are encrusted with chunks of salt from his native Puerto Rico, surrounding indigenous symbols of historic Puerto Rican structure to create what he describes as “visual decolonization.”

 

Laura Karetzky’s sensuously painted realistic scenes are straightforward, while their images convey a sense of the complexities and paradoxes of everyday life.

 

David Henderson’s fiberglass Artemise 2 cantilevers dramatically out from the wall, looking like two cells on the verge of splitting, colored an unnaturally synthetic blue.

 

Joanne Greenbaum is known for her energetic large-scale abstract paintings that combine geometry and color fields in unexpected and spontaneous ways. Here we exhibit two rarely seen glass paintings.

 

Jim Sullivan’s paintings channel the awe of 19 th century Romanticism into the 21 st century with vivid imaginary scenes of drama, including a long, panoramic landscape that is only three inches high.

 

Hal Saulson’s two paintings, from his Caught Napping/Gloaming Gloom series, feature googly eyes, silhouetted hands, and energetic lines of force in eccentric and witty compositions.

 

Petr Hlinomaz’ black and white documentary photographs capture a sense of street life in New York City, including vividly composed scenes of the Lower East Side.

 

Pioneering earthworks artist Alan Sonfist is represented by Spring, an early painting with leaves embedded in pigment that evokes a forest floor, as always paying homage to nature.

 

George Hirose has made an extended series of night photographs of Lower East Side scenes, neighborhood vistas that glow with the color of the artificial street lights.

 

Curt Hoppe has worked years on a series of photographs portraying many of the leading bohemian artistic figures of the Lower East Side, images that he used to make into dramatic, over-life-sized, photorealistic paintings.

 

In Sharon Garbe’s Cave of Humors, a geometric wood lattice bars the entrance to a cone of dark felt, which houses a plaster dog contemplating an irregular white polygon standing on edge—a three dimensional reinterpretation of Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia (1514), with a little less melancholy.

 

Kate Teal has developed her own technique of drawing grisaille perspectival scenes on Tyvec paper that she adheres directly to the wall, creating startling plunges into illusionistic space.