I saw this mini-retrospective of Dona's work strangely the day before this Roberta Smith review. It's not often that a non-sensational painter gets such glowing praise in a Friday review. The show is brave and so is her career. Glad I got my 21 year old ass kicked by her on a regular basis.
Here is the Times review:
DONA NELSON: IN SITU
Paintings, 1973-Present
Thomas Erben
526 West 26th Street, Chelsea
Through May 31
There are many ways a New York museum could avoid merely validating the art market; one would be to surprise us all and give the New York painter Dona Nelson a survey. She has painted prolifically and innovatively for nearly 40 years, following her own path through the gap between abstraction and representation. She has been sustained by an adventuresome emphasis on materials, an appreciation of outsider art and an athletic (or, more fashionably, “performative”) approach to process that builds on the art of Jackson Pollock and the Minimalist notion of specificity. For Ms. Nelson, however, specificity evolved into a charged compression of feeling, surface fact and optical experience.
Her restless career has dodged the burden (and thus the rewards) of a superficially consistent style. But this show, which sums up 35 years with only 10 works, reveals some of its underlying unities.
For example, a small untitled black-and-white work from 1973 and the quietly hallucinatory “Fleshy Reflection” from 1997 reflect her pursuit of more complex and organic variations on the Minimalist grid. “My Home III” and “My Home IV” from 2000 and 2001, which have an image of a village church in common, use cheesecloth dipped in paint to conflate the white-on-white of modernism with snowy calendar art. The first painting has the added jolt of crazed, spidery flings of intense blue, and the second has a predella of the Nativity.
“April,” a blue abstraction from 2008 that has been worked on from both sides and is attached perpendicular to the wall, seems willfully eccentric. But “Line Street,” a bright, scabby abstraction from 2007, is excellent, as is “The Palmist Reveals the Future of Painting” from 1992, a bright mandalalike image made entirely of short strips of dyed canvas; it shows an immense indigo hand embedded in designs of orange, yellow and purple.
Ms. Nelson is a bit like Marsden Hartley — that is to say, a great risk-taker and consequently a sometimes uneven artist. But in curatorial terms, her lengthening, adventurous career has produced more than enough to work with. ROBERTA SMITH
May 23, 2008
Dona "Tyler" Nelson
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when i was in nyc the other week i wish i had stopped by this show. i had dona nelson for one semester as an independent study over ten years ago. she was intimidating but constructive. she not only agreed to the independent study but she was an important reference for me - and she was also clear that she didn't like my paintings. she is smart, serious, and intuitive all things a great artist should be. it was funny when i asked her to be my reference, i knew she didn't like my work but i didn't like hers either so we were in a great place together. i know her recommendation went a long way and it is a testament to her as an artist that she would teach without taste getting in the way of learning. i did learn alot from her even though i was really pissed at the time when she convinced me to cut part of my painting up and glue it to another one.
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