Edith Newhall

Edith Newhall has been reviewing gallery exhibitions for The Inquirer since April 2005. She is a former staff writer for New York Magazine, where she covered the New York art world in features, exhibition reviews and interviews with artists. Her articles on the arts and travel have also been published in ARTnews, the Washington Post, Travel & Leisure and Condé-Nast Traveler. She is the co-author of "In Artists' Homes" (Clarkson Potter, 1992).

"White Vegas Chandelier," a baroque octopus lighting fixture by Adam Wallacavage on display in his bizarre "Shiny Monsters: An Installation" at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Review: Wallacavage meets Jules Verne at the Art Alliance

Edie Newhall

Posted 05/24/2012

It’s hard to imagine any exhibition that could rival the over-the-top visual circus assembled by Miss Rockaway Armada at the Philadelphia Art Alliance last spring, but Adam Wallacavage’s enchantingly bizarre "Shiny Monsters: An Installation," though a smaller show limited mainly to the Alliance’s second floor, is just as mesmerizing in its own way. Where the Miss Rockaway Armada succeeds at the DIY, thrown-together effect (not!), Wallacavage is the master of finesse. His baroque octopus and sea serpent-shaped chandeliers and sconces are so seamlessly constructed you wonder if he made them or had them fabricated (they’re all handmade by him). The inspiration behind Wallacavage’s pieces came from the dining room in his own house on Broad Street, which he modeled after Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and from the interiors of now-closed Gothic and Renaissance Revival Catholic churches in Philadelphia that he visited as a youth. Wallacavage, who is also a photographer, taught himself the traditional techniques of ornamental plastering, began sculpting with epoxy clay (his hand-modeled clay makes up a good part of his works, such as an octopus’ tentacles), and eventually developed his own glistening glazes.

Christy Langer’s wall-mounted sculpture, “Sevens” (2008) with resin and oil paint, is at the Wexler Gallery through June.

Gallery review: Here comes summer

Edie Newhall

Posted 05/17/2012

Summer has started early, judging from the number of group shows already under way in Philadelphia galleries. Nature, rendered in almost every form imaginable, is the chief subject. Sienna Freeman, Wexler Gallery’s director and an artist herself, is the curator behind Wexler’s “Wild Nature,” a gathering of four artists from across the country and Canada who envision nature through the lens of memory, dreams, and natural-history museum dioramas.

Review: Baltzell blooms in move to canvas - 05/10/2012: Edie Newhall

Jan Baltzell’s recent abstract paintings at Schmidt Dean Gallery show her experimenting with gesture and color and pushing both to more dramatic effect than in the paintings of her last show here. The soft, muted greens, pale violets, and grays common to those works of a few years ago, which suggested meandering walks through the Wissahickon woods in early spring, have been revved up with riotous de Kooning-esque oranges, pinks, and yellows, while her linear brushstrokes now loop, twist, and swerve as if tracking the movements of ecstatic dancers. Having previously only seen Baltzell’s paintings on Mylar, itself a muted, translucent material (and which Baltzell has again employed for most of the works in this show), I was excited to see her color and painterly brushwork transposed to a stretched canvas support for the first time in her show’s two large-scale paintings.
Gallery review: Jill O’Bryan’s deep breaths - 05/03/2012: Edie Newhall

If you think you’re picking up strange vibrations at Gallery Joe, you’re not alone. Jill O’Bryan’s drawings can do that to you. I know I felt a scraping vibration when I saw a work of hers in a group show there, “Very, Very Large Drawings,” in 2009. I later learned that O’Bryan made that enormous drawing of geologic-looking markings by taking a roll of paper into the New Mexico mountains, laying it flat on a slab of rock, and rubbing its entire surface with graphite.
Gallery review: Emma Wilcox, fighting photographer - 04/26/2012: Edie Newhall

Informed in 2004 that her house in Newark, N.J., was soon to be demolished, the photographer Emma Wilcox exacted a kind of artistic revenge on the city’s exercises of eminent domain. She began writing enormous, pithy texts in flour and paint on rooftops throughout the city and photographing them from a helicopter. (She knew, unlike many Internet users, that Google Earth does not function in real time.) Upstairs at the Print Center, where her documentary daytime aerial photographs from the series “Where It Falls” are paired with her mysterious nocturnal street scenes of Newark, from an ongoing series titled “Forensic Landscapes,” Wilcox comes across as an activist and a romantic. In the former, she’s following in the tradition of John Fekner, who spray-painted his anonymous “Warning Signs” in Queens and the South Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s to raise awareness of the boroughs’ decay; in the latter series, she’s a contemporary Brassai, who like the great street-prowling Parisian photographer, seems magnetically drawn to the seedy beauty of her city’s rougher edges.
Galleries: German Gomez's men, mixed and matched, at Bridgette Mayer - 04/20/2012: Edie Newhall

German Gomez’s exhibition at Bridgette Mayer Gallery offers further proof of this gallery’s increasingly international focus. Gomez’s life-size color photographs of nude and partially clothed men, one series of which re-creates Michelangelo’s “The Damned” from his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and many of which are composites of several male figures or faces torn from their original photographs and reassembled, are clearly the work of an artist steeped in European painting. Gomez, who lives in Madrid and received both his B.F.A. and his M.F.A. from the Complutense University there, must also have more than a passing knowledge of the affichistes, those European artists who became known in the 1950s and 1960s for their paintings and collages fashioned from fragments of posters they removed from walls.
Dufala Brothers make the everyday winsome in solo show at Fleisher/Ollman - 04/13/2012: Edie Newhall

If there is any trend dominating Philadelphia’s contemporary-art landscape at this moment, it’s the DIY, rough-around-the-edges one epitomized by the work of the Dufala brothers, Steven and Billy, who came to Philadelphia from South Jersey with instinctive talents for retrofitting and reinventing everyday things and infusing them with deadpan, often dark, humor. Their ice cream truck-turned-army tank, winner of the 2009 West Grand Prize, is still their classic of the genre. For their second solo show with Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, the prolific duo have pulled out all the stops and then some.
Galleries: Arcadia features minimalist works in 'A Closer Look' - 04/06/2012: By Edith Newhall, For The Inquirer

Arcadia University Art Gallery's "A Closer Look" exhibition, which has traditionally shone the spotlight on a handful of veterans of the gallery's sprawling "Works on Paper" shows, has returned in an eighth iteration organized by Adelina Vlas. Vlas, the assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, began her selection process in 2009 with a pool of 150 artists from which she chose 40, then 15, and eventually the five whose works are on view now.
Galleries: The solitary, in color and black-and-white - 03/25/2012: By Edith Newhall, For The Inquirer

At first glance, the staged color photographs of Nadine Rovner and the candid black-and-white ones of Yuichi Hibi, on view in two solo shows at Gallery 339, would seem to have little in common. But a longer look reveals both photographers as exceptionally attuned to the poetry of solitariness.
Galleries: Landscape, portrait photographs by Emmet Gowin - 03/16/2012: By Edith Newhall, For The Inquirer

The photographer Emmet Gowin is justifiably well known for the remarkably frank, and simultaneously mysterious, portraits he took of his wife, Edith Morris, and their family in the 1960s and '70s. His aerial photographs of landscapes ravaged by strip mini
Galleries: A wide-ranging celebration of 2d-wave feminism - 03/11/2012: By Edith Newhall, For The Inquirer

After two visits to Fleisher/Ollman Gallery's "You, Me, We, She," I've come to think of it as an all-women Whitney Biennial. It's not nearly as sprawling as a biennial, of course, but it's simmering with radical ideas, presents works in various media by artists of different generations, features the works of individuals and groups, and offers related activities and events, on the premises and elsewhere.
Galleries: David Kettner's artwork displayed in "par-uh-doks" - 03/02/2012: By Edith Newhall, For The Inquirer

David Kettner, a professor of painting and drawing at the University of the Arts for the last 43 years and much admired in that post, retired last month, and the university is honoring him with a one-person exhibition, "par-uh-doks," encompassing two of its galleries and the walls of the president's office. Get there ASAP - this two-week bon voyage has only five days to go.