Human/Nature
Alice Gauvin Gallery • Portland, ME • alicegauvingallery.com • Through March 26, 2022
Opened in 2021, the Alice Gauvin Gallery has gone the group show route for its first few exhibitions, gathering diverse artists around a theme. For Human/Nature, the gallery offers recent paintings and prints by Simon Carr, Cathy Diamond, Elizabeth Higgins, and Gina Sawin, all of whom connect in diverse ways to the natural world through their work.
Based in New Gloucester, ME, Sawin makes her connection via a variety of birds, often presented in groups in flight. An oil, Airborne Godwits, 2021, depicts 16 of the long-billed and -legged migratory seabirds winging across the canvas. This is not the choreography of a murmuration, but rather a kind of stop-action image of helter-skelter avian grace.
Canadian-born painter and printmaker Elizabeth Higgins, who lives in Connecticut, takes a semi-abstract approach to landscape. A 2016 view of Bantry Bay in Ireland is a simple arrangement of hills, sea, and sky, with luminous greens and blues predominant. If not for dark outlines and a small house in the foreground, the painting could be labeled color field. Figure by Shore, 2020, is more emotionally resonant thanks to the small individual in green jacket standing alone before a broad vista.
Queens, NY, resident Cathy Diamond likes her nature all shook up, as it were, with hinted-at plant and what she has called “creatural” forms morphing across the picture plane. The oil on paper Toward the Light, 2022, might be a view through a jungle or an underwater grotto. In the Thick is even more immersive—as if we were in the middle of a winter storm in the mountains.
In his etching and dry proof Lascaux III, 2021, Simon Carr looks back to the Paleolithic cave paintings in southwestern France for inspiration. Carr, who maintains a studio in New York City, emulates the simple majesty of those early images of animals. His active mark-making captures the dynamic of a bucking swayback horse-like creature.
On the basis of this exhibition, the gallery is off to a strong start, presenting four established artists with distinctly modernist sensibilities. Variety, they say, is the spice of life, and this exhibition proves it.
—Carl Little