Coral Springs Potpourri
A modern cubist, a furniture embellisher, and two chicks named Grace —
lassoed together
BY MICHAEL MILLS
newtimesbpb.com
27 Jan 2005

>From Yuroz’ Human Rights Mural: Using multiple points of view simultaneously

“Yuroz’s Narrative Culture of Cubism,” “Felipe R. Luque: Arte Decorativo,”
“Grace Dubow: Simply Grace!”, and “Grace Fishenfeld: Moving Along Through
Media and Idea.”
On display through February 19.
Where: Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs Center for the Arts, 2855
Coral Springs Dr., Coral Springs, 954-340-5000.

Necessity, so it goes, is the mother of invention. In the case of the Coral
Springs Museum of Art, the need is to fill about 8,000 square feet of
display space on a regular basis. Amazingly, director Barbara K. O’Keefe
does it and does it well, continuing to work with limited resources (a
minuscule budget, a staff consisting mostly of part-timers and volunteers)
and within the confines of city government.
Visit at pretty much any given time and you’ll see the results of O’Keefe’s
inventiveness. Right now, for instance, the museum is host to four solo
exhibitions: “Yuroz’s Narrative Culture of Cubism,” “Felipe R. Luque: Arte
Decorativo,” “Grace Dubow: Simply Grace!”, and “Grace Fishenfeld: Moving
Along Through Media and Idea.” The big center gallery is also temporarily
home to a separate Yuroz work, the massive painting installation United
Nations’ Human Rights Mural 2004.
Off to one side of that main gallery, the museum’s current artist in
residence, Barbara W. Watler, is also at work. (Let’s just say, for the
moment, that a sewing machine and fingerprints are involved.) Adjacent to
Watler’s makeshift workspace are the beginnings of a new art library,
featuring books donated by patrons and custom-made bookshelves. And in the
formerly open space on the other side of the center gallery, behind the
Yuroz mural, there’s now a little seating area furnished with functional art
by W.F. Withers, whose fluid designs for a trio of chairs and a table
beautifully mesh with the museum’s overall look and feel.
As for the exhibitions, while they’re all respectable — O’Keefe rarely
curates a clinker — they also vary in quality. Yuroz, born Yuri Gevorgian
in 1956 in the Soviet (at the time) Republic of Armenia, is the headliner
here. His “Narrative Culture of Cubism,” originally scheduled to end in
November but now extended through mid-February, consists of nearly 30 works,
most of them fairly large oil paintings on canvas or board, supplemented by
a few charcoal drawings.
Yuroz, as the show’s title indicates, specializes in cubism, making him
something of an oddity in contemporary art. He hasn’t, as might be expected,
imposed any radical reinterpretation on the once-revolutionary technique of
using multiple points of view simultaneously. Rather, he has adapted the
classic cubism of Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris to his own ends.
At first glance, some of Yuroz’s paintings could almost be mistaken for the
work of such early-20th-century cubist pioneers. The carefully controlled
palette, the emphasis on geometric shapes, even the subject matter — all
the basic elements are there. Again and again, Yuroz returns to the same
visual ingredients: men holding or playing guitars, women, wineglasses,
flowers, fruit.
And the subjects are almost always couples. There’s one threesome (two men
and a woman) included in the show, and a few paintings feature solo men or
women, although the women, in particular, tend to look forlorn or at least
bored without male companionship. Then again, all of Yuroz’s characters have
more or less the same blank look. Almost anything could be read into this
lack of affect. In at least one piece, Evening Light, a woman’s pose and
demeanor suggest that she’s a prostitute waiting for a customer — naked
except for a pair of bright-red heels, she sits alone with a glass of wine
at a small table, legs crossed, one arm propped on the table with the hand
cupping her chin, a cigarette dangling from the other hand, an impossibly
world-weary look on her face.
It’s tempting to speculate that women, who are almost always nude in Yuroz’s
pictures, are little more than props for the artist, except that his men
aren’t much more animated. In the exhibition’s handout, Matthew Lutt writes:
“In the art of Yuroz, lovers embrace each other with such passionate
intimacy that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. They
offer roses, exchange fruit, or dance in celebration of their togetherness.”
This sounds exciting, but the paintings don’t exactly bear it out. The
couples indeed seem to melt together, although their closeness seems more a
function of the cubist style than any physical intimacy or emotional
connection. (Occasionally they even resemble conjoined twins.) Those blue
roses and pomegranates Lutt refers to, like the ubiquitous guitars and
glasses of wine, are there to lend variety to the compositions. Cubism’s
tendency to freeze its subjects is probably why its inventors favored the
still life and may be why a Yuroz painting such as Still Life with Blue
Roses by Window is, paradoxically, more alive than his portraits of people.
A huge exception — literally — is the United Nations’ Human Rights Mural
2004, which, despite the generic title, is full of vibrant life. It consists
of six big canvases of overlapping imagery, crammed with people engaged in
all sorts of activities. Individually, the components were the artwork for
stamps issued in the United States, France, and Austria; together, they form
a dramatic narrative of the worldwide struggle for human rights.
Surrounding the mural and stretching beyond the center of the main gallery
are a dozen and a half pieces of furniture by Felipe R. Luque. The native
Spaniard, who settled in Boca Raton after living in New York, works with
wood, iron, and glass, accented with marble, granite, and quartz, all of
which he transforms into tables and consoles of varying dimensions and
shapes (and, in one dazzling piece, into a tiny bench that serves as a base
for a long, narrow, smoky mirror framed by pieces of wood that look like
tree branches).
As the introduction by Roger S. Selby explains, Luque is fond of working
with found objects, each of which might once have been part of something
else — “It might have been a tool, an armoire or a part of a machine. It
already had a predetermined configuration and a patina from constant use” —
which are then incorporated, often with minimal alterations, into the
artist’s work. This accounts for the irregular forms, as well as for a
certain poignancy unusual for furniture.
The small galleries clustered on the museum’s south side feature two Graces
with very different styles and approaches. Grace Dubow, a Texan who came to
Florida by way of Michigan, is the more traditional of the two, working
mostly in watercolors and favoring floral compositions. One grouping
features six versions of Egrets, each executed in a different medium (the
batik version is the best); it’s an interesting experiment made less
interesting by its subject matter. Of the florals, the watercolor White
Cattleya and White Orchid Tree, in painted silk, are the standouts.
Grace Fishenfeld, who still splits her time between Florida and New York, is
more adventurous, dabbling in media ranging from watercolor, pastel, and
acrylic to collage, woodcut, and gouache. She’s also more ambitious, which
can be admirable or lamentable, depending upon the outcome.
Fishenfeld often runs the risk of overconceptualizing, as in the mixed-media
piece Adam & Eve in the City or the dozen gouaches that make up The Myths.
And she can’t seem to resist editorializing, as in this description of the
pastel Anticipating a Visit: “The elderly eagerly await a visit from
children and friends and hope not to be forgotten.” She’s much better off
when her lofty subject matter is secondary to the medium, as in the woodcut
Acrobat and in several mixed-media reliefs incorporating sand.
If Artist in Residence Barbara Watler is at her post, don’t be afraid to
approach and ask her about her art, and don’t be taken aback if she keeps
right on sewing. Quilting, of all things, is the Hollywood-based artist’s
medium of choice, and sample panels and photo albums of her work are
available for examination.
It’s Watler’s quilting quirk, however, that’s of interest. She takes
individual fingerprints (there’s an ink pad and paper at hand if you’d like
to donate yours), enlarges them to varying degrees, then transforms them
into lovely abstracts on her trusty sewing machine. Leave it to the Coral
Springs Museum’s O’Keefe to find such an unusual artist and bring her to our
attention.