ArtSeen
Mala Iqbal
Misty
Bellwether
In Bellwether’s pristine space on Grand Street, Mala Iqbal’s paintings are alluring and even titillating. A Staten Island native, she says in her artist statement that her work is partly a product of her childhood environment.
Horizon lines are contorted and large skies often loom over strongly foregrounded objects, never people, and these things are often in focus while the rest of the work is blurred. Her larger works, like "Fall Follies" (2003), seem to stretch beyond the limits of what they have to say. They strain to articulate what the smaller works do easily. In the larger works, Iqbal’s sprayed technique is distracting and not as clever; in fact, it is very kitschy.
A smaller work on paper, like "Mushroom and Bricks" (2002), is magical and sensitive. The close-up juxtaposition of the organic forms against the rough red background allows Iqbal to contrast her technique and creates a tension that is arresting.
Two other works, "Crazy Flowers" (2003) and "Starred Plants" (2002), demonstrate another overall effect she revisits again and again. It is an urban American chinoiserie of sorts. Placed against a rough wall-like surface, the plants contort with an arabesque quality along twisting branches. Iqbal’s world is germinated by shiny dollar store art that brings the quirky third-world manufacturers to first world consumers and displays their cultural heritage for a discounted price. Iqbal uses those visualizations and superimposes them on the world around her.
In "My View" (2003) the urban skyline stays close to the bottom edge of the page, like a seventeenth century Dutch landscape. The angular clouds swirl in the sea of a bright red sky. It is deceptively pretty but anyone that has lived somewhere that experiences such piercing redness in the sky, knows that such intensity is often the result of pollution—the joke is very clever. Again the contrast of the delicate silhouette of the city with the canopy of the sky is the key to the tension that makes the image intriguing. Now the question is whether she can go beyond that one trick she’s mastered. Iqbal has a keen eye for effect but seems to prefer ephemeral visuals to carefully planned and executed images. I like where she’s going but she may be on the express train when she should consider taking the local.
Contributor
Hrag VartanianHrag Vartanian is a writer, critic, and designer. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Robert C. Morgan: The Loggia Paintings: Early and Recent Work
By Jonathan GoodmanNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
Intellectual, critic, and art historian Robert C. Morgan also makes paintings, and has been doing so for most of his long career. The current show, on view in the large, high-ceilinged main space of the Scully Tomasko Foundation, consists of a series of drawings called Living Smoke and Clear Water: small, mostly black-and-white works, of both an abstract expressionist and calligraphic nature (early on in life, Morgan studied with a Japanese calligrapher).

Mala Iqbal: Shape Shifting in the Outer Boroughs and Its Effects on the Travelers Perception of the Midnight Sky
By Andrew Paul WoolbrightOCT 2022 | ArtSeen
Iqbal concretizes the momentary but vivid perceptions of strangers we capture in crowdsthe tangible effects of faces, of fading voices, of the colors and silhouettes of clothingwhile recording the translucent uncertainty of sightings that our memory is unable to make more permanent.
Robert C. Morgan: The Loggia Paintings: Early and Recent Work
By Raphy SarkissianNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
Severe yet expressive, hermetic yet lucid, circumspect yet luxuriant, the geometric abstractions painted by Robert C. Morgan are absorbing explorations of form.
77. (249 Lafayette Street, 57th Street)
By Raphael RubinsteinNOV 2021 | The Miraculous
At the age of 38 an Argentinian artist who has abandoned a law career to become a painter moves to New York City where he rents a studio in Little Italy and supports himself by working as a waiter at the Caffe Figaro on Bleecker Street. The same year he has his debut solo show in the city and moves his studio to 248 Lafayette Street. The following year he has his breakthrough idea of leaving the front of his paintings solid white and applying color only to the sides. When he shows one of his first sides only paintings at a 57th Street gallery, an art critic who visits the show climbs onto a chair to see if the top edge of work has also been painted. (It has.)