The Brooklyn Rail

The legacy of the contemporary artist is increasingly difficult in practical terms. Today, there are many, many artists who, finding themselves below the radar, strive during the course of their careers to gain recognition. But what about their reputations after death? This is a thorny problem, leaving artists with the unhappy consequences of anonymity after lives spent not receiving enough interest from others. But amends must, and can, be made. The wonderful show Accommodating the Object, curated by sculptor and writer Will Corwin, is now up at the foundation originated by painters Milton Resnick and Pat Passof (the building was once Resnick’s home). The exhibition offers terrific work by the mature painters Bosiljka Raditsa and Elizabeth Yamin, who were active during the latter part of the twentieth century without attaining highly prominent careers. Both women, in distinguished fashion, look to an organic abstraction that elaborates on the ab-ex style that immediately preceded them, at the same time pulling away from the past and working out a more current version of that movement. Raditsa tends to favor simpler arrangements of (mostly) rounded forms, while Yamin’s compositions are denser with complications. Both are excellent at exploring the implications of the New York School, whose style emphasizes expansive emotions and free-form ingenuity, in a more recent light.

Corwin did a fine job of curation; the exhibition, located on the first floor, consists of a significant number of both artists’ efforts. Raditsa’s paintings demonstrate a genuine mastery of the abstract idiom. In a very recent painting, The Knots (2023), Raditsa has given us a dark pink background, on top of which several roughly outlined shapes, in yellow, in green, in red, spread across the canvas. In the center is a slate-blue circular shape, on top of which we find a coiled loop of rope—hence the title. It is unusual to find an artist using so historically established an abstract idiom and making it successful. But Raditsa has.

Another fine, recent painting by Raditsa, called A Corner (2020), is dominated by a thick black stripe that bends slightly along the left edge of the composition, breaks sharply at the top left, and then angles inward and down on the right. A powerful gesture, the black stripe is backed by several colors, mostly a sea blue and green that hug the contours of the angular black form. It is a genuinely successful abstraction—particularly so in light of the very long history of lyric non-objective painting.

In Yamin’s paintings, the shapes are more complicated, but they tend toward rounded rather than linear forms. The intricacies of her work stem from overlapping masses, streaks, or linear effects that take place, often, on top of each other, as in a palimpsest.

In Mysterious Object (2022), Yamin fills a horizontal canvas with things that seem to be recognizable, but ultimately are not: this tends to be her general strategy. Something looking like an outsized white key, or a saw, crosses the horizontal plane of the composition, its sawtooth jags occurring along the top edge of the form. Other forms are jumbled in. Colored white, green, brown, and black, the various, formally unreadable shapes fit closely around the key-like object. The work is an excellent enigma, made so by an array of shapes that defy figurative interpretation.

Yamin’s beautiful drawing, called Daily News (1987), exists as a mass of scribbles, differently colored, superimposed on top of each other. There is a heap of black lines, mostly active on the right side of the work. They drift and trail across a space made energetic by similar lines of other colors (red, white, blue). The background, an off-white hue, serves as a bright foil to the massed lines and the black, yellow, and blue rectangular weights of color.

The work is wonderful in its vivid use of an expansiveness that goes back to the New York School’s heyday in the middle of the previous century. Both Raditsa and Yamin make a very strong case for the ongoing interest of a lyrically abstract style. Their exuberance, their skill, and equally their persistence, along with Corwin’s fine curation and equally fine essay placing the two artists in context and describing the work, has resulted in a genuinely significant show.