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.
Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian
2023.4.9
For
a while I’d been hearing how wonderful the current Helen Frankenthaler
exhibition at Gagosian is, and kept regretting I hadn’t yet seen it.
Finally, I did, and wow, its praises were not overblown. These
paintings, made in the 1990s when Frankenthaler was in her 60s and
confident in her technique and vision, are magical. Seamlessly blending
her signature soak-staining with opaque brush work, Frankenthaler’s
late paintings seem to emerge directly from her inner voice, as if
the climate, air, breezes, light and water simply passed through her
body and on to the canvas. Most of the paintings are large, complete
worlds of the flow of nature, canvases on which seemingly accidental
marks are not accidental at all, but perfectly placed accent points
within otherwise vast areas of colored air, where small splashes become
huge statements of moments in time within the vast spaces of atmosphere
and light, and quirky marks grow out of the voids as part of an
unconscious rhythm of nature’s greater order. The exhibition remains up
through April 22 at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery.
made on large paper
made on large paper