EXTRACTING THE ESSENCE: PAINTINGS BY ESTELLE RICHMAN
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The 13 paintings and one drawing in this show span four years, allowing one to see Richman’s growth as an artist as well as the metamorphosis of her technique. Her somber palette–which ranges from black to sepia to gray blue–is an essential component in the work, which evokes a peculiar poignancy. As the show’s title suggests, Richman’s interest lies in merging visual consciousness with subconscious imagery, and these paintings map this murky terrain.
Some of the works succeed because Richman’s expert manipulations of her medium transform what might seem the hapless gropings of a painter without a subject. Several of the earlier canvases reveal that Richman’s expressionistic impulse is a point of departure for the more subdued, minimal later work. A Wondering, a moderately sized canvas from 1990-’91, is the most obvious throwback to abstract expressionism, knitting together broad brush strokes of black and white against a gray ground. If all the work were like this, one might question why Richman was pursuing such a familiar painting strategy. But more developed pieces, though they use a similar palette and start from a similar place, go beyond abstract expressionism, allowing vague forms to evolve from the treatment. In the 1990-’91 Earth Dreams, her largest painting and a sort of bridge to the later work, Richman sets up a sequence of forms knit together by a neutral palette; a figure is vaguely suggested, but the form remains provocatively enigmatic.
