Hers and His

Hers and His Charles Stuckey Starting on September 18 Galería Mascota is presenting a selection of important works by the veteran New York artists Dove Bradshaw and William Anastasi at a satellite space for Galeria Mascota at 980 Madison, on the third floor. It has been five years since major works by either of them have been exhibited in New York. Surrounded a few years ago by works like these installed in the Upper West Side apartment where Bradshaw and Anastasi have lived and worked since they became life partners nearly a half century ago, their friend, the late Robert Ryman, opined that together their works surpassed anything on view in any current New York gallery. While most married artists work independently of one another, Bradshaw and Anastasi (already an acclaimed conceptual art pioneer by 1974 when they met) both embrace the aesthetics of John Cage with its emphasis on chance methods. Starting in 1984 they served jointly as artistic advisors for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. As if to go beyond conceptual art, around this same time each began to make monumental works that integrated abstract gestural painting with conceptual procedures outside their control. Orchestrating sense and nonsense, the colors for the works in Anastasi’s ongoing Bababad series are determined by chance, while the seemingly meaningless stenciled letters are excerpts from the one hundred letter thunderclap accompanying the bricklayer Finnegan falling to his death at the beginning of Joyce’s classic tale. As for Bradshaw, whose striking materialistic sculptures starting already in the late 60s involve an expertise of metal elements, her dark mysterious pigments for the monumental Contingency paintings are silver and liver of sulfur, unstable together and so fated to change hue and shape long after the artist set it into motion. She has a special eye for exquisite accident, whether self-initiated or found at random, like the plastic exuberance of bullets shaped by chance on impact, each as like as unlike. Greatly enlarged and cast in resin these found objects become her festive Spent Bullet sculptures, coated with metallic automotive colors. No less dramatic, the graphic excitement in Anastasi’s Burst drawings, repeating the simplest single gesture from here to there as a visualization of the magnificence of energy exhausted is in keeping with the power of the Spent Bullets. Both artists make the case that chance-based art has an impact and truth that rivals the most profound works of the last half century.