Contemporary art always comes with a stunning botanical backdrop at Wave Hill, the Bronx garden and cultural center on the Hudson. And though the green-thumbed artists in this season’s show -Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli and Terry Winters — have made the rounds of Chelsea, the natural setting refreshes some of their familiar tropes.
It helps that all three made work specifically for this exhibition, responding to different parts of the grounds. Mr. Taaffe explored the Wild Garden and the air plants in the Tropical House, though his paintings have an under-the-sea quality; in “Cereus Chrysocentrus,” spiky, anemonelike forms float on a marbled ground.
Mr. Winters’s points of reference are the Dry and Herb Gardens, as evidenced by the palette of lavender, lime and viridian green in a new painting titled “Wave Hill.” His signature form of the last few years, the knotted graph, seems little changed. It’s a versatile seed, though, whether teased apart in his “Hexagram” series, or rendered three-dimensional in the relief prints “Pollen.”
Mr. Tomaselli looked to the local fauna as well as the flora; his new painting, “The Dust Blows Forward, the Dust Blows Back,” features a blue jay he spotted during a fall visit to Wave Hill. Here and in the psychedelic “Dahlia” Mr. Tomaselli traps minute photographic elements under layers of clear resin. But in the contoured leaves of “Bloom” and “Coldframe,” painting overtakes collage (not always successfully).
Viewers puzzled by the show’s abstruse title [Alchemy & Inquiry] should pick up the brochure, which has an essay by Peter Lamborn Wilson. His studies of Sufism and Western Hermeticism lend a mystical-spiritual dimension, with countercultural leanings, to the artists’ cultivation of nature.
Wave Hill
Independence Avenue and West 249th Street
Riverdale, the Bronx
Through June 19
Visit Wave Hill and download the pdf catalogue with P.L. Wilson's essay.
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