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Paintings by Bruce Adams at the Castellani Art Museum

Back in 2004, when Bruce Adams participated in art photographer Spencer Tunick’s project in the Central Terminal involving naked multitudes, he had a revelation. Looking around at the sea of naked bodies, he said, it struck him: Not one of them was beautiful. The revelation prepared him for making his own art, a major exhibit of which is currently on show at the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University. Paintings of naked bodies aplenty, many of them distinctly not beautiful. (The bodies, not the paintings.)

Paintings by Rodney Taylor at UB Center for the Arts

The title of Rodney Taylor’s exhibit at UB Center for the Arts is Impure Abstraction. Impure as in abstraction that morphs into figuration, or just suggestions of identifiable imagery, though inescapable suggestions. Impure also as to media. Taylor paints in clay and pigment slurries, thickly applied, like mud, that when they dry and harden, crack like mud, and disintegrate, or threaten to disintegrate, fall in flakes and bits from the canvas or paper matrix. Art as a product of time and gravity as well as the initial work of the artist. And in a crude and graceless pictorial to non-pictorial style. Consciously uncouth. The style of first learners about how to make art.



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