FALLS VILLAGE — “Kim Schmidt Fine Art at Furnace Art on Paper” in Falls Village includes nearly 100 artworks — primarily drawings and prints — by approximately 50 artists.
The exhibition, curated by Schmidt, an art dealer with extensive experience in works on paper and installation, mixes work by well-known artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Leonardo Drew, Kiki Smith and Pat Steir and others. The show will be on view at the Furnace Gallery through Aug. 8.
A former director of Crown Point Press, a legendary Bay Area print publisher and former director of the Marlborough Gallery in New York, Schmidt specializes in drawing, printmaking, collage and other hand processes involving paper. She divides her time between Millerton and New York City.
Schmidt said she is particularly drawn to art that closely observes nature. Animals, plants, and birds provide a rich vein for the artists in this show, while many of the abstractions evoke natural forms, she said.
One of the many works in the show is a black-and-white etching called “Eight Dogs” (1993) created by the then-nonagenarian California artist Wayne Thiebaud, best known for rendering colorful candy and cake delights. Depicting dogs and their antics, “Eight Dogs” features loosely drawn or cartoonish images of scruffy dogs standing, running, or jumping.
Valerie Hammond, an expert printmaker, made several of the works on display, including a lithograph and stencil print called “Blue Hare” (2015). Representing an Irish talisman of death and memory, in which human souls may inhabit a hare, her precisely rendered creature floats in an eerie, indeterminate space. Her “Chimera (Owl)” (2016) creates a confounding illusion: it superimposes the hand-painted, three-dimensional paper wings of an owl moth over an etched image of an owl, so that the eyes on the moth’s wings double as those of the bird.
Kiki Smith, a multimedia artist based in the Hudson Valley, is represented by numerous prints in the show including a series of nine etchings with watercolor, each portraying an individual flower, every petal delineated with a delicate line. A 1996 plaster sculpture of a homely pigeon, tethered by a plastic string to an egg and resting on a narrow shelf like a windowsill, evokes sympathy for the challenges of urban avians.
The show is a veritable sampler of works by artists committed to the plant and animal kingdoms. Among them is a life-size bronze sculpture of a young, long-haired calf by the Connecticut-based artist Carl D’Alvia — not to mention his “Stone ‘Shroom” table sculpture.
The exhibition presents works using staining, smoke and even burning to create images, ranging from John Cage’s etched and smoke-darkened prints to Leslie Dill’s Emily Dickinson-inspired typography on a tea-stained paper dress in, “Poem Dress, The Soul selects her own Society” (1993). In one of the most recent works in the exhibition, “Untitled Silver,” Kathleen Kucka — a resident of Lakeville and founder of the Furnace — applies dozens of small fires to paper, resulting in a murmuration of delicate, oval-shaped holes, each ringed by the umber and charcoal colors of burnt fibers. These swirl across a sheet of paper partially covered with silver oil paint. Though an abstract work, the alluring palette and patterned spots in “Untitled Silver” could summon a moonlit leopard.
Among the varied works in the show is one called “Rising Temperatures 9” (2023), by Anne Lindberg, that at first reads as an abstraction but reveals itself as a horizon-filled landscape composed of thousands of chromatically arranged lines of colored pencil. Lindberg, who lives and works in Ancramdale is perhaps best known for her ethereal sculptures and immersive spaces made up of seemingly innumerable light-reflecting threads.
Schmidt’s eye for installation — for creating lively relationships between works of complementary styles and materials by disparate artists — is a reward on its own. For example, a metallic-colored Leonardo Drew work, molded from handmade paper, sits adjacent to Kucka’s “Untitled Silver,” and the luminous qualities of both works are enhanced. The choice of work and their placement sets three smaller-than-life hand-printed and hand-sewn doll-size dresses — two by Leslie Dill and one by Valerie Hammond — in play from three walls of the room.
