Four artists from the Tribecca region of New York have been brought together for a small show at the Jo Rain Gallery in Anglesea Street, Dublin. All four are painters, but their work spans a little history of art from abstract expressionism to minimalism and back again. The surprising aspect of the show is that all the work, except for Brian Henderson's extended homage to Barnett Newman from the 1970s, was completed in the last two years.
Nancy Van Deren's paintings take their names from East Coast sites, with literary resonances such as Poughkeepsie, Walden and Albany, and their appearance suggests library shelves well stocked with pastel spines. Bars of oily colour are slotted together, with layer after layer of pigment trying to push through from below, while the thin board beneath seems to be curling in tranquil contemplation.
Six Pack After Barnett New- man is the group title of Henderson's chunky pictures, triptychs of various colour keys. In Henderson's paintings, which loosely evoke Newman's Onement works, images are broken into individual frames and Newman's "zips" are made over in strongly-contrasting colours and finishes, occasionally dipping into shimmering bronzes and golds.
Of the two remaining painters, James Burnett's The Lost City series, soft compositions of geometric elements in watery gouache, are unconvincing, while the images in Bryan Hillstrom's Jo Rain series, in which the brush flickers and skids across passages of clean harmony, are brasher, but only marginally more urgent for that.