Installation view of Susan Fortgang: The Spaces in Between, Eric Firestone Gallery, New York.
This week in Newly Reviewed, Will Heinrich covers Raoul De Keyser’s elegance, Nicola Tyson’s camp sincerity, Susan Fortgang’s bright geometry and Dietmar Busse’s uncanny New York.
Though Susan Fortgang has shown her art intermittently since getting an M.F.A. at Yale in 1968, and was included in “Pattern Painting,” an influential group show at P. S. 1 in 1978, “The Spaces in Between” at Eric Firestone Gallery is her first official solo exhibition. It includes a couple of large, gestural abstract paintings from the 1960s, but since the late ’70s, Fortgang has been using rules, grids, tape and thick layers of acrylic paint to make brightly colored, geometric works that look very much like textiles.
In “Signal,” probably my favorite piece, the motif is a kind of metastasized plaid, with two thick double bars of bluish-black running straight down the middle. Thinner bars of turquoise, red, white and golden yellow, along with deftly positioned painterly drips, combine to explosive effect, because it’s all just a little too much to parse. And when you approach the painting for a closer look, you discover that grooved layers of impasto make the texture plaid, too.