Mary Henry:art ltd review by Richard Speer: "Mary Henry: Paintings and Drawings"

PORTLAND
Mary Henry: “Paintings And Drawings” at PDX Contemporary Art
Nationally lauded although most consistently exhibited on the West Coast, veteran painter Mary Henry enjoyed a long and fruitful career. Her death on May 20—during the course of this show’s run—at the age of 96, lent an unanticipated poignance to this chronologically expansive, formally cohesive exhibition. Born in Sonoma, California, Henry earned her undergraduate degree at CCAC in the 1930s and her MFA in the 1940s at the Chicago Institute of Design. There she studied under László Moholy-Nagy, gleaning from the preeminent constructivist a predilection for the hard edge. In the 1960s and ’70s she combined Pop’s unabashed colors with Minimalism’s austere forms.

There are other influences and integrations from the arc of 20th century abstraction. In the bright, blocky Metaphor(1995) and more subdued Sarabande(1997) we see a reshuffling of De Stijl. A cheeky, Stella-esque concentricity enlivens the bold bullseyes of On/Off 8A On/Off 8B (1967), and Lichtenstein hovers around the cartoonish lines and outlines of It Even Rains in California (1971). But the artist shows her own sui generis hand in paintings that evoke her native Northern California. Nowhere is this achieved more poetically than in Full Moon Over the Mendocino Headlands(1971). A melding of elegantly cinematic proportion (48” x 72”), finely honed gradations of color, and archetypal imagery, it posits horizon line, silvery orb, and cool, flat black stretching out implacably, evoking the chill of windswept cliffside, the white noise of surf pounding rock. This is the kind of painting you can feel on your face like droplets of salt water on a midnight hike. Mystical in atmospherics, muscular in its graphic punch, it balances Zen quietude and Western ambitiousness, intoning its own soundtrack in the mind’s ear: part bamboo flute, part fugue, an Alan Hovhaness tone poem in acrylic paint.

Other geometric motifs include the mirror imagery of Memory Field (1991) and Vermillion(1975) and the witty semantic juxtaposition of Language Barrier with Orange(2005). A selection of works on paper includes Social Realism-flavored landscapes from 1941 and a suite of eight watercolors and ink drawings from 1964, showing the artist’s movement from organic curves to rectilinearity. With its 64-year span—from the 1941 drawings to a 2005 painting of undiminished freshness—the show opened with the feeling of a retrospective and ended on the heels of Henry’s death, providing a fitting valediction.

—RICHARD SPEER