The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Ann Toebbe at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery
2022.1.11
My third LES gallery last week was Tibor de Nagy Gallery where Ann Toebbe's ostensibly peaceful paintings are on view. Perhaps it was just my mood that day, but like the Catherine Murphy and Phillip Pearlstein shows I'd just seen (see my recent posts), what at first seemed comfortable and straight forward took on more complex reading as I looked longer. Though clearly suggesting three-dimensional space, Toebbe uses no vanishing points but simply raises the height and reduces the scale of objects as they go back in space, creating a tension between illusionistic space and flat pattern. Alternately, she magically opens walls so we see the inside of her studio from the outside street, as if bringing the public into her private art-making experience. Or a window view is show sideways so that it feels like it emanates from the artist's eyes.