23 Feb 2020

9th St. Club

Gazelli Art House

Reviewed by Derek Horton

Since the history of Abstract Expressionism has been revisited from a feminist perspective, the work of Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan has become increasingly visible. This context frames "9th St. Club" at Gazelli Art House, which shows these artists and contributes a new dimension by including two much less familiar but, on this evidence, equally significant figures, Perle Fine and Mercedes Matter.

Artists are represented by fairly small works (drawings, collages, lithographs, watercolors, and studies for oil paintings) spanning from 1936 to 1991, although most are from the key period of the 1950s and '60s. Contrary to the clichés of spontaneity, freedom, improvisation, and large scale that are so often associated with Abstract Expressionism, here we are presented instead (especially in Hartigan's collages, Fine's constructions, and an early Krasner drawing) with these artists' structured and disciplined experimentation, and their carefully considered sense of composition.