Annette Turow

Annette Turow				Main Gallery, Small Works Gallery			Oct 28 - Nov 29, 2006

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	ANNETTE TUROW – Nostalgic Architecture Annette Turow is known for her abstract paintings that seek to evoke states of mind – one of the traditional functions of 20th century abstract art was to conjure up emotional states while avoiding specific figurative references. In this new series, she takes a slightly different direction. Her paintings make recognizably abstract designs, which are more stringently geometrical than anything that appears in her previous work. However, as soon as we begin to look at them closely, we realize that they are in fact quasi-figurative. These intricate geometrical designs are based on familiar features of American domestic architecture, nostalgically remembered. She focuses on two physical aspects – the ingenuity of some specific features, as in the painting “Crank Windows,” and the nature of the inhabited spaces, as in “Garden Apartment.” Edward Hopper is usually regarded as the antithesis of abstraction – indeed, he is now seen as a painter who resisted the whole Abstract Expressionist movement that flourished so exceedingly during his lifetime. Yet there are a number of Hopper paintings of empty rooms, made at the very end of his career, that seem to resist this perception. Spaces that would previously have been inhabited by his rather bluntly constructed figures are now presented as things to be contemplated for their own sake, and also as things that remain filled with the human presence even though actual human beings are absent. Annette Turow seems to present something of that kind here. The fact that the titles of the paintings are often linked to specific dates implies that these images spring from specific moments, nostalgically recalled. This prompts a comparison with a British artist who is in most respects very different from Hopper – Howard Hodgkin, recently the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in London. Taking hints from the domestic scenes painted by Bonnard and Vuillard, the two leading artists of the Nabis Group, Hodgkin, during the middle years of his career, painted pictures that are hermetic records of particular socal occasion. To do this he pushed the intricate patterning characteristic of his French exemplars just a little further, coding the figurative references to make them more mysterious. Turow is, I think, doing something of the same sort in this new series, though she seems to refer to solitary, contemplative moments rather than social ones. One feature of the paintings is the carefully elaboration of texture. We all of us, I think, remember places from our past with reference not simply to color and form, but to the intimate natures of their surfaces – the cracked, sunburned paint of a particular windowsill for example. The artist is clearly very much attuned to this kind of nuance, which is something that also manifests itself in her previous work. When we look at the nature of abstract painting in general we note that it sprang originally from deliberate acts of ‘not seeing’. Kandinsky, for instance, offers a famous account of coming into his studio and seeing some of the figurative works he was then producing turned on their sides For a moment he was unable to recognize what they represented – he saw them only as arrangements of form and color. Using American domestic architecture as her theme, Turow courts this kind of disconnection as a way of releasing memories and of defining the emotions these emotions produce. Edward Lucie-Smith Edward Lucie-Smith is best known as a writer of books on contemporary art. His titles include Movements in Art Since 1945, Art Today and Art Tomorrow. He is also an exhibition curator, poet and internationally exhibited photographer.