This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 16, 2008 - All That Tends to Purify: 9 Abstract Painters at Philip Slein Gallery is required viewing both before and after you see SLAM's Action/Abstraction and the Kemper's Birth of Cool.
Phil Slein has brought together some contemporary painters who reach out to the hard-edge '60s cool, intellectual color studies, and others who embrace the live-for-the-moment expressionist set. Some of them opt for both approaches into their works, such as Alicia LaChance, who layers graphic images of vegetation over splashes of sublime color in her large-scale "Walking City No. 11 or Joy Systems" (2008).
Alternatively, it's nice to see artists making generous expressionist gestures on smallish formats, like Michael Miksicek and Ken Wood -- the containment tends to up the emotional ente of the brushstrokes.
The smaller second gallery is all '60s cool redux, with a beautiful four-panel painting and two works on paper by Miksicek, spanned by five ink and acrylics on paper by Wood showing clusters of bubble-like forms.
Also in this room, Barry Leibman's large "Untitled (Opera)," points in a whole new direction for the artist. It's splashy and controlled at once, with scumbly bushstrokes, a couple spare paint drips, and an upper right corner devoted to a study in brilliant colors. To call it "retro" would be to sell Leibman short. It's a contemporary work, to be sure, but the painting is also a lesson in why gesture and abstract form became so exciting at mid-century.
In the main gallery, Michael Byron poses a conceptual counterpoint to the whole affair. He essentially translates other paintings -- the canvases as well as the frames, mats and labels -- into abstracted versions of themselves.
Chicago artist Bruce Riley's "Crazy Jen" and "Me Machine" employ layers of acrylic and resin for a decidedly contemporary post-pop exuberance.
The only true contemporary hard-edge moments in this show are provided by Brandon Anschultz, and you'd better take a look at those, because word has it he's going elsewhere stylistically in his next exhibit.
It's hard to pin this show down; certainly it's abstract, as the title promises, but it's not all "pure."
It's a smart combination of great contemporary painting, the kind of show Phil Slein does best, and it's a fascinating comtribution to the conversations on abstration going on this season.
Ivy Cooper is an artist and professor of art history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.