Newspaper Review of the Mobile Art Show

Artwork, imagery provocative in Tullman show
Sunday, December 10, 2006

Compelling. Disturbing. Disconcerting. In your face.

"Contemporary Imaginings: The Howard A. and Judith Tullman Collection" is not for all tastes. I say that up front because this show is not for the timorous or the easily offended. The 47 paintings and 14 drawings on view at the Mobile Museum of Art in Langan Park, many of them quite large, are drawn from the Tullmans' Chicago-based collection and speak volumes about the revivified interest in image and narrative by American artists.

In his collector's statement, Howard Tullman alludes to a sign outside the couple's loft that reads in part: "We collect art that seizes your attention and imagination. Art that you cannot look away from or beyond. Art that contains a demonstrable strength and power. Art which effectively tells a story and ... always has more to reveal."

Tullman correctly notes that one cannot presume to reduce three decades of collecting and almost a thousand artworks into "a series of pithy statements in a sign on the wall. Ultimately, ... the art in the Collection speaks for itself."
And so it does, sometimes emphatically, and with a candor and passion than many gallery visitors will find discomfiting.

"Try to escape looking at Uma Thurman in Terry Rodgers' 'The Vortex' or to avoid the penetrating stare of the little nymph in Nola Romano's 'The Competition: Part Two: To The Finish' and you begin to understand the power of the pieces," Tullman writes.

The collectors' fondness for images that convey what the text describes as a "shared sense of asocial isolation" is jarringly evident in Caleb Weintraub's horrific "Party Favors," with its demon children amid human carnage; and in Chris Scarborough's unsettling portrait of a victim, titled "The Devil Was Great, I Swallowed Burning Cigarettes and Ate Ashes."

Whatever one thinks of the subject matter -- and I doubt whether more genteel visitors linger at these canvases -- the artwork is often sublime, imaginatively conceived and executed, and often rich with color. In many instances, "hot" colors (yellow, red, orange) contrast sharply with the darker subtext of the painting.
Consider Paul Sierra's nightmarish "Untitled" (1993), which depicts a silhouetted figure running along a wooded road or path, as though pursued by unseen forces in a fever-dream.

Study the ironic composition of John Alexander's provocative "Snake Oil Salesman" (1987-88), which strongly suggests the unwholesome link between sin and piety, and perhaps the hypocrisy of the "religion bidness."

Try not to flinch at the imminent savagery in Leonard Koscianski's "Clash" (1988), which might be a visual metaphor for war, good and evil, or the duality of humankind.

In his foreword to the "Creative Imaginings" catalog, chief curator Paul W. Richelson, Ph.D., writes: "Transformed from the expectable, image and narrative have returned to being viable strategies for contemporary artists."

He and Donan Klooz, curator of exhibitions, selected works of "provocative creativity," says Richelson, who says the new wrinkle in this show is "the artist's willingness to eclectically mine the past and its visual language; although there may be a discernible echo of Old Master lighting, folk art, cartoons, illustration or Surrealist fantasy, the result is truly visually arresting and unique."

This "twisted classicism" is the reason visitors might choose to spend a few moments with Bruno Surdo's droll "So What Do You Think?" which does suggest the work of a Flemish master. (The artist stands naked at the far left, wearing a red cap and dark glasses, while other characters in the painting reflect varying levels of interest in the central figure, a shirtless young man wearing headphones.)

Try to discern the levels of meaning in "Hyacinth Arsonist" (1999) by Thomas Woodruff, with its statuesque blond nude (with eyepatch) starting a fire with a magnifying glass.

To see how the collectors' taste and interests have progressed, Tullman urges a comparison with the early drawing of "Older Woman" by Bill Vuksanovich with the "Jody Carter" portrait by Mary Borgman; or Vuksanovich's tragic "Business Clown" with Wes Magyar's "Study of Lucas."

Nudity is prevalent in the Tullman show, from Alan Loehle's "Embrace" (1989), featuring a man and a woman, a Rottweiler and a graffiti-streaked wall, to Jennifer Presant's seductive " Projection Memory Desire" (2002), a bedroom dreamscape. Whether standing full frontal, reclining or at an oblique angle, the nudes here are by turns vulnerable, querulous and defiant.

Sometimes they are merely us, like the pregnant woman with her stuffed bear in Tamie Beldue's "Veracity" (2005), alone with our dreams, isolated in a gray world between who we are and who we wish to be.

"Contemporary Imaginings" will remain on view through Jan. 7. View the Tullmans' loft at www.tullman.com or at http://tours3.vht.com/vt/STD/ virtualtour.aspx?ListingID=10 29445 .