Through April 30th
Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South
Free
There was no wine left at the Locks Gallery’s First Friday reception a mere two hours after the show opened. In the prim neighborhood of Washington Square, the gallery stood out as a warm and hip harbor from the rain, filled with paintings ironically resembling and inspired by bodies of water. “Endless Source” sits on the first floor of the gallery featuring the recent work of Philadelphia–based artist (and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts MFA program critic) Neysa Grassi.
The paintings ran along the wall like a timeline: thick squares of wood grain and linen arranged somewhat by size, but more noticeably by color. A wall of mostly white fades into a group of paintings that bring in a pale red, then green, then blue. One resembles a lake at sunrise, another white rapids, twisting red rivers. The colors are muted and washed out, almost impressionistic except for a deep blue that works around the sides of the paintings like a photograph burned at the edges. The paint pops off the canvases in three–dimensional representation of ripples in a pond or a drop of water into a pool, and the paintings stand out for their texture, mostly only visible up close. As Jennie Hirsh wrote in “Art in America” a few years ago, “the paintings often have a sculptural effect.”
The two most striking (and largest) works in the gallery stood facing each other on opposite walls. Grassi’s 2011 piece “Pleasant Lake,” at 60 x 55 7/8 inches, achieves a filtered effect different from the other pieces in that it seems like there exists some kind of physical scene, but the colors and shapes are so obscured that it becomes more of an expression in accepting abstraction.
For being mostly out of the way from other First Friday attractions, the gallery boasted a very large crowd including a few families with their preteens. Also shown on the second floor of the space is an exhibition of paintings from the seventies and eighties by the former Philadelphia College of Art from professor Warren Rohrer. This exhibition is the perfect place to escape the April showers (with more water, but whatever).
