Eckert Fine Art Returns to Kent

After stints in Kent, then Millerton and finally Shekomeko, N.Y., Jane Eckert has returned to Kent and created a gallery in the Kent Barns complex where the yarn store used to be. After new landscaping by the Barns’ owners, she will face James Barron’s gallery across a lovely planted pedestrian area where cars used to park.

Eckert is known for offering both established and newer artists, for helping make careers and for her expertise and “eye.” Her belief in Eric Forstmann, for example, helped place his paintings of shirts on hangers and everyday objects arranged on and in shelves, in collections and museums around the country. What she has chosen to show for her reopening in Kent is typical.

Forstmann is again represented by shirts. Most arresting — from a distance they look three-dimensional — are dark blue polo shirts hanging close together on a pole. Tiny variations in light and paint thickness make them seem real, collaged from actual fabric. An enormous vertical picture is about his fascination with clouds, here dark, dramatic and swirling with small hints of light behind.

Then there is an Eckert find: Chizura Kaplan, whose career has been as an architectural renderer. At Eckert she is showing her gorgeous, dreamy watercolors of building facades. In a picture of the Louvre at night, she creates a ghostly rhythm of light and dark, an ephemeral memory of a great building.

Paul Ching-Bor, who teaches watercolor painting at the Art Students League in New York City, is another master of feathery strokes, of haunted and haunting light and dark, of memory more than fact. “As Time Goes By” is a picture from under a city bridge with its sturdiness enveloped in shadow with slivers of light.

An enormous Robert Rauschenberg pigment transfer, “Red River,” dominates a center wall. If you look closely, you can see that on the right it captures a carnival either being set up or taken down. Trees, probably palms, in pots are wrapped in paper; carnival elements are in the background. On the left there is what appears to images from a movie theater — the doors are in front behind a curb, great pipes rise up above, perhaps from the ventilation system. The images are presented on expanses of open white space. It is dramatic and endlessly interesting.

Eckert is a fan of the great graphic designer and early pop artist Robert Indiana. (His 2013 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art was an emphatic endorsement and revelation of his art.) Now she is showing an example of his best known image, “Love,” made in 1964 for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card. The work became iconic when it appeared on a U.S. stamp in 1973. Even more interesting is the entire 1998 suite, “American Dream Series,” full of dramatic examples of Indiana’s use of alphabet and numerals and design elements and symbols to make powerful artistic statements.

Eckert Fine Art is located at 12 Old Barn Road, Unit 1, in Kent, Conn. The gallery is open Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 4 p.m. and by appointment. The show runs through Oct. 1. Call 860-592-0353 or go to www.eckertfineart.com.