Oil paintings by Albert Fayngold and watercolors by Elsie Taliaferro Hill go on display in the Nabi Gallery’s next exhibit, opening Thursday, March 6, with a reception from 6 to 8. Titled New York Reveries, the show presents dreamlike and mysterious visions inspired by the New York cityscape. It remains on view through April 5.
In conjunction with Reveries, the gallery is hosting a concert by the contemporary ensemble Matrix Music Collaborators at 8 p.m. Thursday immediately following the reception. Part of a series titled Building Bridges from Classical to Pop Music, the program, with works by Samson Young, Philip Glass, Karen Siegel, and Paul Wiancko, also reflects a New York frame of mind.
The gallery is at 137 West 25th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, and is also on the web at www.nabigallery.com.
In the lyrical images of Albert Fayngold, familiar scenes are rendered in misty, twilit tones that give them a romantic and faraway quality. Their soft washes of paint, fit into a tight vertical composition, create a startlingly different sense of a city that is New York but could almost be Prague—or Kiev, where the artist was born and raised.
Uptown #2, Fall, oil on canvas, 48x22, 2006
In addition to his career as an artist, Fayngold is a critic, and a teacher of comparative literature at Baruch and C.W. Post. He divides his time between New York and Kiev and has had numerous exhibits at galleries and museums in both cities.
Elsie Taliaferro Hill, in contrast, grew up among the tidal creeks, marshes, and barrier islands of Georgia’s Low Country, and a distinct riverine sensibility came along when she moved to the island of Manhattan. So did the memories of pelicans that are a signature image in many of her paintings.
City Birds, acrylic and oil on canvas, 32x56, 2008
These insouciant birds, along with colorful tugs and shrimp boats, gliding and bobbing amid huge churning waves, were last seen in 2007 in a Nabi show titled From the Dreaming World. The artist previously exhibited in the MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Columbia School of the Arts, from which she graduated in 2006, and at various other art spaces in New York and in her home town of Savannah, Georgia, where she had a thriving career as a portrait painter.
Song with Words in New York is the title of the concert following the opening reception for New York Reveries. The program includes ROXY.NEW YORK, by Samson Young, for amplified string quartet, electronics, and video; Wichita Vortex Sutra, Philip Glass’s keyboard interpretation of Allen Ginsberg’s epic war poem; Karen Siegel’s Leora Courting Rivers, with poetry by Erica Wright, and Paul Wiancko’s Hip-Hop Cello Concerto No. 1. More information about Matrix Music Collaborators and its concert series may be found at www.thematrixmusiccollaborators.com/