Taking a voyage through a large expanse of Red Hook art, by Roger Bell

The work of five American artists, mainly New Yorkers and five German artists, mainly Berliners, is the subject of the exhibition titled International Waters which opened recently as part of the Red Hook Open Studios program in The Wall Gallery. The Wall Gallery is an artist-run space which specializes in exchanges between Brooklyn New York and Berlin Germany. International Waters is the fifth exhibition since the gallery opened in spring of 2021.

Each of the ten artists chosen for this trip have two works on display grouped in 10 pairs with an artist from the USA and from Germany hung closely together. Chad Abbley’s intense geometry lands next to Petra Flierl’s block print, struggling for a meaningful relationship; the two works settle on shared shapes of dense black forms. Bill Nogosek’s fluxus inspired drawing on a magazine page, manipulated through innumerable edits and re-edits finds Frank Lambertz’s surreal figures in a strange ritual, similarities overwhelmed by the uniqueness of each author’s focus. Next we find Richard Dennis’ new painting from his Snowman series which posits an intense painterly field, an icy witness facing a storm laden sky and facing Martin Colden’s small and powerful calligraphic, a portent of an abstract meaning as brittle as Dennis’s comic narrative. Anna Patalano’s vigorous black and white drawing is hung like an animal hide next to Gregor Wiest’s ink drawing, which is also black and white. The two works aspire to almost parallel figurations but collide nevertheless as if pages torn from separate texts. Dennis’s second contribution is another episode of his snowman’s apocalypse and hangs next to the masterful serenity of a Hagen Klennert’s landscape. The shared subtleties seem to knit the sequence of horizons into an oblique cinematic narrative.

In the next couplet we find a drawing from Chris Costan’s Red Hook Intervention series which presents a deeply modeled monochrome sea atop a handwritten message, as though taken from a castaway bottle. Next to her is Petra Flierl’s sensational response through a hand colored print, a cluster of figures seemingly washed ashore after a long voyage. On the back wall Anna Pataloano’s second contribution, unprecedented in its effect, wildly launches a contrasting vortex upon the calm foreboding of Klennert’s second offering, a pensive landscape populated by wonderful and subtle marks. This pairing is the centerpiece of the exhibition and constitutes the most challenging. Motives expressed by color and scale collide and struggle to find a reluctant compromise or at least a willingness to stay aboard.

In the next berth, Nogosek takes another turn at mapping the uncharted sea of meaning next to Martin Colden’s second offering. This pairing provides the astrolabe for International Waters. These two deeply committed late career artists, whose marks cannot help but convey the conviction and discipline of a lifetime artistic voyage, are designated co-captains of this international experiment.

In the next chapter of our logbook we find the beautiful spoiled sister of Chad Abbley’s broken color grid next to Gregor Wiest’s depiction of a lost naked seaman, who curses the shore where he has landed. Between the two a myriad of choices represents the fragile trickery of this show’s curation. Pairs are not pairs, pipes are not pipes. As a conclusion to these stormy couplings Chris Costan drops another message from the deep with her pigmented pool, it is a message made more urgent by its repetition. And confirming her urgency one finds Frank Lambertz’s small masterpiece populated with creatures from the depths of a splendid and tragically lost imagination. But it is dreams like these that attempt to describe the voyage to which we are all conscripted and the artists of this exhibition provide charts of those otherwise uncharted seas.

International Waters, October 7-November 11, 2023, The Wall Gallery, 41 Seabring Street, Red Hook thewallgallerybrooklyn. com