A still life by Mary Sims graces the main gallery in the "Kurts-Bingham Retrospective" exhibition on display at Lisa Kurts Gallery.
It's a clever idea for Lisa Kurts Gallery to mount an exhibition called "Kurts-Bingham Retrospective" (through the end of July), because the result is a gathering of many of the artists that Memphians have loved for years, including local painters Burton Callicott, Veda Reed, Mary Sims, Adele Lemm and Carol Cloar; only Reed is still living of that group.
What's showing are obviously works from the secondary market, that is, pieces that were sold back to the gallery or came back to be sold on consignment.
The "Kurts-Bingham" configuration refers to Alice Bingham, from 1979 to 1992 the doyenne of gallery owners in Memphis and a mentor to Kurts, who founded her gallery Downtown in 1987 and then merged, out east, with Bingham in 1990; the partnership was called Bingham-Kurts Gallery. The partnership dissolved in 1992 when Bingham retired from the art business and moved to Maine. Kurts then called the establishment Kurts-Bingham Gallery, in honor of her mentor, and eventually graduated to Lisa Kurts Gallery.
Most of the artists in this eclectic display, then, are exhibited within the parameters of the partnership or afterward when the gallery became Kurts-Bingham and then Lisa Kurts.
The main gallery looks gorgeous, practically shimmering with paintings and prints carefully chosen to emphasize various reds and yellows, blues and greens. Included here are one of the best of the Callicott "rainbow" paintings, from 1993; a tiny exquisite Mary Sims still life with a lobster motif; two spectacular floral monoprints by Gary Bukovnik, highly decorative, yes, but brilliantly graphic and colorful; one of Michael Eastman's large, haunting Cibachrome photographs of the faded palaces of Havana; a hypnotically beautiful ceramic vessel by Bennett Bean.
In the small gallery to the north hangs one of the best of Reed's vast Midwestern sunset sky-scapes, from 1990. In the same gallery are three pieces by New York artist Alice Neel (1900-1984), two portraits (a lithograph and a silkscreen) from 1981 and '80 respectively, and a lovely, spare, almost Japaneselike silkscreen "Snow in Vermont," from 1981.
The abstract painting that dominates the show in size (80 by 90 inches) and color is "Estuary/Cardinal" by Peter Opheim, "a work hypnotic in its obsessiveness, complexity and dynamism and blazing like a conflagration in brash reds and bursting yellows." Actually, I'm quoting myself in a review, written in 2005, of this very piece when it was first displayed at Lisa Kurts Gallery. The more things change and so on ...
"Kurts-Bingham Retrospective"
At Lisa Kurts Gallery, 766 S. White Station, through July 30. Call (901) 683-6200.
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