Loretta Dunkelman
Engrossed in the Shell (the Sky and the Circle)
October 22 – December 7, 2024

Ice-Sky, 1971-72, oil-wax chalk and pencil on paper, five panels
40 x 135 inches, 101.6 x 342.9 cm / Photo: Steven Probert

Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to announce Engrossed in the Shell (the Sky and the Circle), an exhibition of historical works by American artist Loretta Dunkelman, on view from October 22 through December 7, 2024. The monumental works on paper, drawings, and paintings which comprise this exhibition were made between 1972 and 1987 and reveal the breadth of the artist’s creative output during this time. A founding member of the pioneering feminist A.I.R. Gallery, Dunkelman has lived and worked in lower Manhattan since 1961. This marks her first solo exhibition in nearly four decades.

Ice-Sky, 1971-72 (detail) / Photo: Steven Probert

In 1971, Dunkelman began a series of monumental works on paper which represent some of the earliest examples in the contemporary movement of major art works made with drawing techniques and materials. Inspired by studies of the sky at different times of the day made during her travels to the Aegean Islands, her five-paneled work on paper, Ice-Sky, was included in the seminal 13 Women Artists exhibition at 117 Prince Street in 1972 and the 1973 Whitney Biennial. Dunkelman returned to painting in oil on canvas after 1979, continuing to mine natural motifs, including landscapes and the windows of sky enveloping them. Her interest in color and light are evident in the suite of large-format oil paintings made between 1986-88 while living in Richmond, Virginia. The luminous, layered surfaces of these works evoke her earlier explorations in pencil on paper.

Shell Vellum, 1978, oil-wax chalk and pencil on vellum
72 1/2 x 108 inches, 184.2 x 274.3 cm / Photo: Steven Probert

Shell Vellum, 1978 (detail) / Photo: Steven Probert

Dunkelman (b. 1937, Paterson, NJ) earned an MA from Hunter College in 1966, where she studied under Tony Smith and Ad Reinhardt, and a BA in art from Douglass College (Rutgers University) in 1958. She presented six solo exhibitions with A.I.R. Gallery (New York, NY) between 1973–1987. Notably, her large scale works on paper were included in Women Choose Women at the New York Cultural Center (New York, NY); Of Paper at the Newark Museum (Newark, NJ); American Drawings 1963-73 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); New Painting: Stressing Surface at The Katonah Gallery (Katonah, NY) alongside works by Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, and Ralph Humphrey; and New York Now at the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ). She has participated in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (Queens, NY); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY); Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ); and 55 Walker (New York, NY), among others.

Tintern Abbey, 1987, oil on linen
65 x 75 inches 165.1 x 190.5 cm / Photo: Steven Probert

Dunkelman's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Hunter College, New York, NY; City University Graduate Center, New York, NY; Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY; and Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ. She is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has taught at Cornell University, Virginia Commonwealth University, UC Berkeley and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Island Section, 1986, oil on linen
65 x 75 inches 165.1 x 190.5 cm / Photo: Steven Probert

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration.

– William Wordsworth, from Tintern Abbey, 1798.

Ice-Sky (1971-72) is a large-scale work on paper composed of fifteen segments, each carpeted in succinct violet marks overlaid with white ones, scribbled in consonant directions and separated by tawny gutters. The work, inspired by the sky at various times of day, was originally shown in the foundational exhibit Thirteen Women Artists in 1972, then at the 1973 Whitney Biennial.

In the press release for her first solo show at A.I.R., Dunkelman related her sky-based works to “the exultation of solitude” and concluded with descriptive turns of phrase culled from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves into a sort of poem that begins, “We are edged with mist.” It is an apt evocation; the white Caran d’Ache overlaying much of Dunkelman’s surfaces conjures mist, or a shroud – or a sun-flecked glass window looking out towards the sky.

In Dunkelman’s 1974 Time Passes series, variations on a cymbiform shape are rendered in pencil and filled in with blue-gray oil-wax chalk, which occasionally bleeds past the line; the same moth-blue arch appears in Naoussa, veiled by a layer of white. These white veils are essential in Dunkelman’s work; sometimes scribbled in a soft haze over blues and violets, or else – as in Delphi (1976) – worked with such vigor over pale pinks and blue stripes that it melts into the color beneath, forming a lush, waxy shell that suggests celadon porcelain.

Dunkelman cites Frank Lloyd Wright and Lao Tzu as influences. Negative space. Organic architecture. The all-over surface reaching into the void, the formless, the empty and endless. I accept these as Dunkelman’s starting point, but their austerity is belied by the sumptuousness of Dunkelman’s surface. One gets the sense that Loretta intimately loves this surface.

In her seminal 1979 essay Grids and its slightly looser precursor Grids, You Say?, Rosalind Krauss describes the grid as “antinatural, antimimetic, antireal.” Krauss goes on to say, “In the increasingly de-sacralized space of the 19th century, art became the refuge for religious emotion; it became, as it has remained, a secular form of religion. Although this condition could be discussed openly in the late 19th Century, it is something that is inadmissible in the 20th, so that by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention ‘art’ and ‘spirit’ in the same sentence…[t]he grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).” Krauss notes the grid’s early appearance in painting “in the form of windows, the material presence of their panes expressed by the geometrical intervention of the window’s mullions.” Only more recent developments (Hilma af Klimt’s resurgence, Joseph Masheck’s Faith in Art) have reintroduced the possibility – or more accurately, the proper belonging – of the mystical within the discourse of art. But Dunkelman’s grids engaged their own sacral power and intimate potential early on. Critic Lawrence Alloway wrote often about Dunkelman and her cohort, and posited that, “among the painters using grids and repetitive forms, Loretta Dunkelman combines modules with subtle color gradations that seem to corrode the stability of the grid, but without destroying it.”

In 1972, Robert Pincus-Witten wrote about reductivist geometric abstraction, noting artists’ tendency to “remove the brushstroke from aesthetic graphicism…from sensibility”, further embellishing that their gestures were “liberated from sensibility” (emphasis mine). What prompted the mid-century urge to be “liberated” from sensibility? ‘Serious art’ then, I have been told by many artists, needed to be evacuated of personal content; ‘serious artists’ dealt with art itself as a subject matter. Women artists seemed particularly concerned about falling on the right side of this distinction. Pincus-Witten’s wording suggested that sensibility was something to be escaped, a liability to be avoided. Dunkelman does not avoid it. Her minimalism is somehow both obsessive and devoid of control-freak tendencies. Her geometric invocations are softened by nuance, but the stark literality of her work’s subject matter — a sky, a shell — give them a frank emotional resonance.

In 1978, Dunkelman made Shell Vellum, in which the shell-and-stripe pattern of a shower curtain hand-picked by Dunkelman at the age of 14 is depicted in gold pencil overlayed with white and bisected by graphite stripes across several multi-layered vellum panels. Though Dunkelman had previously avoided overtly pictorial content, Shell Vellum changed her approach. “There were so many things I thought of doing but wouldn’t let myself,” says Dunkelman. “I questioned whether it was art…because it was personal. But after that, I incorporated images. I gave myself permission.”

Dunkelman’s work, including her painting, often explores what I think of as “drawing ideas”. The works trace repetitive gestures. They seem to keep time. Her drawn works on paper at times evoke Agnes Martin, but where Martin’s works are firmly situated in the desert landscape of their origin, Dunkelman is an urban animal: the natural phenomena she depicts, however sprawling, are viewed through a window – subdivided, sliced, blanketed with white wax chalk like filmy glass or a gauze curtain. She is a solitary visitor.

By the 1980’s, Dunkelman says, her work “had become a repository of private memories.” An untitled work on paper from this period comprises muted but colorful gestural lines and shapes of oil-wax chalk, pencil, and watercolor, suspended in a blank picture plane. The work seems to free-associate abstract, anatomic, or still-life imagery. In 1983, Diana Morris wrote that the beauty of Dunkelman’s work from this time resides in its “unity, its looseness of execution, and in its ability to elect and objectify our own memories.” Dunkelman, Morris concluded, is “an artist permitting herself an enviable measure of freedom.”

The latest work in the show, Tintern Abbey (1987) is a large oil painting that describes houses and trees distributed across a sunlit landscape, contained on three sides by a bright blue stripe painted to a hair’s width from the canvas edge, simulating a frame or pane. In William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, the poet encounters the sublime while revisiting the Wye River in Wales and reflecting on the landscape’s unchanged beauty. The Abbey itself does not appear. In Dunkelman’s painting, the grid is gone – or is it? Has its stability simply been corroded, per Alloway, or more accurately overgrown – a grid that has, to use Krauss’ language, turned back towards nature – been subsumed by it?

A memory: At Loretta’s studio on Canal Street, a cracking blue sky out, lazy sunlight pouring in the windows. Loretta asks if I want her to make me a tuna fish sandwich. Not a snack or a meal; a tuna fish sandwich, specifically. I cannot believe this sandwich. It is the platonic ideal of a New York Jewish meal: tuna salad, lettuce, tomatoes, and sliced dill pickles on sliced rye bread. Loretta hands the sandwich to me on an ovular plate with a handful of ruffled potato chips and a Diet Coke. All it needs is a toothpick, and I could be in a luncheonette. It is the best thing I have eaten in a long time.

– Andrea Neustein

Press

Cultured Magazine | Loretta Dunkelman | 87-Year-Old Painter Loretta Dunkelman Hasn’t Had a New York Solo in Almost Four Decades. That’s Changing This Fall