A new twist on blue chips.
At last year's ART Santa Fe, the international art fair that has been a Santa Fe staple since 1995, one dealer with a particularly edgy selection of works suggested to me that, despite Santa Fe's hundreds of art galleries, there is room for more.
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Parsing through the near crushing weight of the existing galleries, after all, reveals only a few contemporary and modern galleries and, of those, only a handful are notable for a commitment to quality works by exceptional artists. Among even that rarefied stratum, both prices and content have often been kept tame out of consideration for Santa Fe's conservative taste.
The thinking of this particular dealer was that there is finally an entire population of art collectors who have moved to Santa Fe but who, effectively, cannot shop for art here. The level of contemporary work that they are interested in simply is not available, or not, at any rate, across a very broad spectrum. Much of the most exciting art to arrive in Santa Fe, therefore, is doing so inside dark delivery trucks.
Later this year, Manhattan-based Claire Oliver will open a gallery in Santa Fe. This comes on the heels of her Project event, a tweaked version of the contemporary art fair, running in tandem with the opening events of the SITE Santa Fe Biennial. ART Santa Fe, formerly occurring every other summer, has gone to an annual format, and will bring its expanded selection of galleries and artists through Santa Fe this July. But last week's official opening of the William Shearburn Gallery fired the first salvo in the surge to satisfy an increasingly sophisticated and engaged brand of local collector.
Located upstairs on San Francisco Street, the Shearburn Gallery capitalizes on the increased sense of intimacy offered by leaving the street and climbing up into its careful and quiet aerie. Previous tenants have been cluttered and curio-happy, but Shearburn's treatment is far more spare, not only in deference to the amount of space each artwork needs, but also toward the considerable amount of space that each of the impressive works is able to command.
A venerable St. Louis, Mo., gallery, Shearburn's foray into Santa Fe brings with it a balanced offering of blue chip modern prints and paintings alongside contemporary and emerging artists. There is some overlap with existing galleries, but Shearburn's full range and expertise is unique.
For example, Shearburn is one of the few dealers in the country with access to the Robert Motherwell estate and, in addition to the expected prints (which are salivatingly priced), the gallery's inaugural exhibition features a painting done in acrylic and China marker on Masonite. An untitled work from 1982, it's a scribble in the pigment-nothing too grandiose-but an arresting and resonant work that seems only by magic to be in Santa Fe and not locked in a museum far, far away.
There also are large aquatints by Robert Mangold, reductive visual equations in geometry, full-bodied forms that somehow spill out of the flatness. Across from these is a recent Helen Frankenthaler woodcut done in 34 colors. It's ***image1***called "Snow Pines," but it's smoldering, a menagerie of slow, uncurling forms and suggestions, full of skulls, sex and eruptions at the edge of time. Nearby, a Lichtenstein loiters. A suite of 10 lithographs by Fred Sandback positively dominates one long stretch of wall, precise and powerful as mountains on the horizon of a long plain. One small shelf holds the smallest, cutest little John Chamberlain sculpture you've ever seen. It's even pink.
Andrew Millner presents a large-scale ink jet print, titularly titled with the latitude and longitude of what?-perhaps the stand of aspen trees he has carefully done in freehand on a digital tablet. The controlled fury of his white lines against a deep chocolate background mostly forgives the lack of tooth inherent in the ink jet, even on fine Somerset paper. Sally Moore offers an exploded disaster, sculptural and wall-mounted; its shadowy forms and shattered surfaces are enough, but its interrupted and unknowable narrative balances the work, and the exhibition as a whole. A plexiglass case, again wall-mounted, is packed with squirmy, pink labels from fabric shirts in a work by Joseph Havel. It is brain matter, bisections, a laboratory drawer from a future in which humans are simple specimens, our trappings to be idly studied.
There are other surprises too. A large Donald Baechler silk screen, horrifically made with flocking, is a graphic powerhouse; dark sunflowers fill the foreground and give way to ghostly images of keys, cloth patterns, melancholy. Almost hidden away-a find for the adventurous, or those willing to make nuisance of themselves-is a Louise Bourgeois print done in drypoint.
Melissa Rountree, gallery director for Shearburn's Santa Fe location, grasps the work in her hands and angles it carefully. The image is a series of floating eyes, small and simple. Rountree describes the velvety line earned by the drypoint process, the poetics transferred through to the print from each twinge and decision in Bourgeois' hand.
I don't know how many more galleries Santa Fe has room for, but it's worth making space for this one.
