The request was color and humor, the response is From The Vault +1. Ronald Sosinski, Director of The Proposition gallery, has culled “from the vault” four of the gallery’s strongest colorists tinged with an occasional conceptual humorous bite to formulate a powerful statement reassessing some great works from the recent past. The works from the four artists, Li Lin Lee, Simon Linke, Nachume Miller and Gary Petri have been literally brought from the The Proposition’s (formerly Donahue | Sosinski Gallery) vault where outstanding work from the past 25 years have been stored and treasured. The +1 artist and featured art for the exhibition is by Evan Levine, a recent MFA graduate from Yale and an exciting new roster addition to the gallery. The exhibition which is installed on the 2nd floor premises of Broadway Suites, located at 192 Lexington Avenue (between 31st and 32nd Street) in NYC has an opening reception on Thursday, December 10th from 5-7 pm and can be viewed by appointment (beginning December 11th) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 1-4 pm by contacting Jessica Marks of Broadway Suites by phone at 212-802-1400.

Nachume Miller’s paintings capture the elemental power of nature and its majesty. The following is a review of Nachume Miller’s 1999 exhibition, Suns and Illusions by David Ebony, senior editor at Art in America, from his “Top Ten” list in Artnet Magazine: “Among the many high points of the show is a large canvas in which streaks of white traversing the composition emanate from a white orb, perhaps a blistering hot sun. Sinuous strokes of red and orange snake along the opposite edge of the canvas. They hint at some strange species of plant. In other paintings. colored bands of light crisscross the surface in complex patterns. These visionary works were obviously produced by an artist who never lost faith in the primacy of nature nor in the transcendent potential of painting.”

Gary Petri was the first officially “represented” artist of Donahue | Sosinski gallery. From The Vault showcases three of his early major works described in an Art in America review from April 1992: “Gary Petri’s paintings are wild paraphrases of midcentury abstraction. He was inspired by early Abstract Expressionist works that show the influence of Surrealism, particularly those of Gorky and Rothko when they drew on Masson’s sort of automatism or biomorphic shapes a la Miró. To this tradition Petri adds his own vocabulary of whimsical shapes and painterly gestures. In their dramatic interplay they often pun on the visual rhetoric of his predecessors as well as make poetic statements of private significance in terms of textural nuances, cool decorativeness and use of biological forms. The bright clashing colors and the odd confrontations of geometric and organic forms create a dialogue in which Petri’s subtle humor is pervasive.”

Li Lin Lee is represented by a single painting, as described by Ken Johnson in his review from October 1999 in The New York Times, “Lee continues to produce delightfully rich and playful abstractions. In the new canvasses, cartoonish biomorphic and molecular forms, some with eyeballs, wriggle and cavort in radioactive spaces, stirring up a Jetsons-style festivity.”

Simon Linke is an English artist very well known in New York for his paintings of Artforum covers, described in a Summer 1991 Artscribe review as “…a precedent for the use of the printed page as an artistic image…Linke’s work deviates from these precedents a little, yet remains connected with existing examinations of repetition and power in advertising…Linke’s paintings are not flat; the paint has been somewhat belaboured over the surface…they do not attempt directly to appropriate any standard typographic repro technique and this ensures that they are more like paintings than appropriations…” The four works in the show were created by Linke in 2003 and are truly “from the vault.” They present highly humorous portraits of the familiar cartoon characters “Tweety Bird” and “Wile E. Coyote” done by Linke during a time when he was taking a break from his highly recognizable Artforum paintings. These works have rarely been exhibited and are a real treat.

“Evan Levine’s paintings explore an idiosyncratic language of abstraction in which a serious formal investigation of color, light, composition and perception is undercut by a certain playfulness and humor. The forms function as vibrant characters with individualized personalities that reflect a primitive impulse towards hand-drawn motifs as well as a penchant for crisp geometry and design. Recently the artist has begun to experiment with hand drawn letters to explore the potential of using words and sentences as a catalyst for meaning and expression.”