The Brooklyn Rail

The most immediately remarkable aspect of the works on paper by Loretta Dunkelman now on view at Polina Berlin Gallery are their lustrous surfaces: blocks of oil-wax chalk in blues and pinks so heavily worked that they appear burnished. On close inspection Dunkelman’s fields of color reveal pea or dime-sized glossy constellations—almost iridescent, depending on your angle—left by the momentary pressure of the artist’s touch. These layer over each other across the composition, less distinct and regular than the geometry of fish scales or mosaics, but with the same effect of natural repetition, evoking an intense desire for touch. These sumptuous fields sit inside shapes sketched out on the paper in graphite, here rectangles and semicircles either closed or open at the top, like a bowl.

Graphite lines are suggestions, not rules; Dunkelman’s is not a hegemony of the sharp edge. Rather, she colors over exterior borders, yielding fuzzy outlines akin to the profile of a cashmere sweater or the boundary of a cloud. Inside the two rectangular examples, A Letter to Constantine and Delphi (both 1976), graphite lines run perpendicular to compositional stripes that alternate blue and pink. Technically, these perpendicular lines—sometimes emphasized through incision—do not create a grid, because their articulation, as in Delphi, is contained within the blue passages, rather than traversing the four pink horizontal stripes as well. The reward is extremely subtle. The pink stripes would seem to lie above the blue, except that Dunkelman has applied a white veil over the whole composition, creating an allover haze that exiles any implication of space from the work. All of this astonished me, because the current exhibition is Dunkelman’s first solo show in nearly four decades, so most of us will not have had the opportunity to see the work in depth, or indeed at all, and the works’ many nuances translate particularly poorly in photographs.

Polina Berlin is showing seven works on paper and one on vellum that were created between 1971 and 1978, as well as two oil paintings from 1986 and 1987. With these works, we find an artist wielding key tenets of mid-century American modernism (expression, seriality, modularity) but bending them to her own ends. Though Dunkelman often fabricated and conceptualized components (of a single artwork, or of several works within a series) as multiple units, her work as a whole beautifully articulates a logic of connectedness. For example, the three works on paper from the 1974 “Time Passes” series on view here present a small semicircle at the top of the page (Time Passes IV), a thick outline of that semicircle (Time Passes VII), and a thin outline of that thick outline (Time Passes VI) that would seem to slot together, one above the next, if superimposed. Wholeness is not the aim here, however. As elsewhere, Dunkelman’s oil-wax chalk spills over the graphite line, creating a wavering boundary that would prevent a frictionless fit. There are, moreover, four other works in this series that are not included in the exhibition, and they further complicate any presuppositions we might have about sequencing, linearity, or part-to-whole relationships. Making use of larger filled semicircles, or an outline that cuts off halfway across the page, the larger set tells a story of recursion or substitution based on experience. It is a story of connectedness we must work to construe.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the show’s masterpiece, the large-scale wall drawing Ice-Sky (1971–72) on five panels of thick paper, each tacked directly to the wall. (On view in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, Ice-Sky was unfortunately not then acquired by that institution, where it would be an ideal fit.) Each of the five panels contains three equal brick-like fields set apart from each other by narrow ravines of mostly-bare paper, hardly visible from a distance. The periwinkle and lavender layers of the fifteen bricks are modulated by a handwriting-like texture and by varying value, as some units contain more white oil-wax chalk overlay than others. The coherence of the whole is undeniable, but the logic of each individual block’s placement is less clear. This is not the ideology of negation espoused by Dunkelman’s teacher at Hunter College, Ad Reinhardt, or the standardizing and de-subjectifying effect of Donald Judd’s identical repeated forms, or even the systematically self-exhausting seriality of Mel Bochner’s work. It seems, instead, a hard turn into subjectivity, personal experience, and the open-ended nature of the viewing experience. Ice-Sky suggests light, atmosphere, and the hard-won, self-made thing.

In 1970, Dunkelman inaugurated a series of sky studies while visiting the Greek island Ios. That link to nature is palpable in her work as allusion rather than as a direct referent. Dunkelman’s relation to the structure of natural phenomena is clarified by the large-scale wall drawing Shell Vellum (1978), where clusters of seashells cascade across the composition in gentle diagonals. Shell Vellum organizes personal experience through making, routed here through Dunkelman’s observation of shells on a shower curtain she selected, rather than examples seen at the beach. Along with the aerial landscapes in oil in the back gallery, Shell Vellum asserts that seeking out connection between discrete units need not remain the enterprise solely of abstraction. The structure we find in nature depends on where we are, and how we look.