A Women's Art Exhibit - Not Exactly

The “Some Women and a Triangle” exhibition at James Barron Art in Kent, Conn., presents over 75 works by 14 women and one man, selected as a mix of trained and untrained artists. 

Forty-three acrylic paintings on canvas by Italian artist Vera Girivi hang on one wall, all nudes of women of various sizes and ages. Girivi’s gold, silver and green patterned decorative surfaces and unevenly brushed dark lines give a brazen nod to the beloved painters of Vienna. The gestures and compositions of many are likable homages to Matisse, while the figures’ roundness and repose make the paintings authentically the artist’s own. The works are inviting looks at various states of the feminine, largely unfettered by flattery. 

A group of Janet Sobel’s gouache on paper and board paintings present colorful abstractions of the natural world. 

Paintings by Elisabetta Zangrandi depict a nature wonderland in acrylic paint on wood, and on stones she has found while walking in the mountains. One of her untitled paintings with a lush volcanic background has the words “PACHA MAMA” etched into a cliff, while mystic figures dance and partake in earthly delights. 

Zanele Muholi’s “Thembitshe (Parktown)” gelatin silver print is a contrast of an ebony figure posed against a stark white background, in a gesture twisted inward. The work is strikingly beautiful and tortuously arresting.  

Featured sculptor Beverly Pepper says in a 2015 interview with James Barron, “I continue to work on a piece until it is what it wants to be. I keep working until I have nothing more to add.” Her polished stainless steel sculpture “Anguillara” is the result of this process of discovery.  Its reflective surface and strong angular qualities give a sleek look that is deceptively masculine, yet so much of the sculpture is flat, like a creased ribbon of silver lying low on the pedestal, that it suggests a humble pose, a closeness to the earth once again. 

The “Large Brown Stoneware Vessel” by Janet Leach is a rotund ultramarine glazed ceramic piece that in its luster carries the nuances of the Japanese tea ceremony. “MaMa Pot” by Ruth Duckworth is similarly round, in earth and bronze patina tones, while being much more abstract, slashed aggressively on one side with a lattice texture. The same texture is then echoed in the Moira Dryer painting “Untitled,” in which broad rust-colored horizontal strokes of casein drip down on a wood surface. 

Many of the artists touch on discovery through mistakes. Jeanette Barron’s accidental glitch in her photograph “Cyan Mirror #3” makes a bold cobalt blue streak across the bottom of the print of a blurred single oval mirror reflecting a subtle satiny vapor. The poignant series of mirror “self-portraits” have a transcendent quality, so free of self that viewers can identify their own self deeply within each mood. 

Luck factors into Laura de Santillana’s process of creating her tonal glass “books.”  She says, “Yes, you do something with the accidents.  It’s controlled chance.” Combining masterful skill with serendipity are works like “Tokyo-Ga,” a series of hand-blown compressed and shaped glass sculptures that stand transparent containing Rothko-esque color fields, alternately warm, cool and earthy within each glass piece. It is the willingness to make mistakes paired with the dedication to craft that lends brilliance to these works. 

At the apex of the exhibition, purportedly about women artists, is the most expensive 2D piece in the show, by someone who is decidedly not a woman: Sol Lewitt’s “Triangle.” 

Barron says, “‘The Triangle’ by Sol LeWitt alludes to the triangle in the Wassily Kandinsky book, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art,’ in which Kandinsky writes of a triangle having the visionary artist on the top, and the public at the bottom.” 

This piece being heavily emphasized in the exhibition title and announcement, by a male artist, and justified arbitrarily by a male expert, seems a little off. Especially since hanging directly below it, are pieces by women artists selling for 5% of the price of the male artist’s. Barron may have had the best intentions for “Some Women and a Triangle” but the rhetoric he places at the forefront is a cacophony of male voices. In James Barron’s experimental exhibition, the creative process leaves room for mistakes. 

“Some Women and a Triangle” runs through Aug. 25,  James Barron Art, 17 Old Barn Road, Kent, CT , 917-270-8044.