Tussle Does Tangibilia

Last day of "Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia" is tomorrow, and a review just appeared.

John Goodrich is photographing the exhibition as I type this.

It has been an enormously exciting week here in New York. The response to the show by painters whom I respect has been uniformly laudatory. (One called the paintings “terrific little ass kickers.”) The exhibition has also garnered a review in Tussle. Sculptor and writer William Corwin noted:

Crisp and comfortable, [Einspruch] uses simple images drawn from daily life that offer a basic and easily understood narrative or psychological setting: a couple making dinner together as in Dinner Prep (2023, woodblock print on masa) or making love as in Private Life (2022, oil on linen), or a figure tracking us over a shelf as in Bookstore (2023, egg tempera on paper).  We get the story in a glance, so the artist can dispense with naturalism and is liberated to engage our senses in terms of line, thickness of paint, and comedic and grotesque manipulations of his character’s anatomy. These manipulations act in service to his goal of flattening space and isolating and engendering a puzzle-like interlocking quality to all form—a kind of medium is the message subtext, but less McLuhan and more the stained glass windows of Chartres.

Have a look at the whole thing (archived here).

Tomorrow (Saturday 6/8) is the last day of the exhibition, and we’ll be hosting public hours 12-5 PM. There will be copies of Aphorisms for Artists available for signing. I can also open the space for you at your convenience if you arrange it with me at dissidentmuse@proton.me. The address of the space, THERE, is 135 W. 26th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, 9B, New York City. The original announcement about the show, with the press release and artist statement, is here.

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“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia,” an exhibition at THERE in New York City, runs through tomorrow. Hope to see you.

The current entry of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel. For more information see the ASBC calendar, which is kind of toast at the moment, but it will give you an idea of what typically goes on.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.