The Brooklyn Rail

In 1974, Hal Bromm, who had previously studied at the Pratt Institute and worked for a New York architectural firm, became a private art dealer. Bromm soon befriended Henry Geldzahler, then curator at the Met, who introduced him to David Hockney. The next year, Bromm mounted his first exhibition, made up of antiques and artworks, at his 10 Beach Street loft. Galvanized by a group of young British artists whom he met through Hockney, Bromm then organized New London in New York. The show boasted an array of now-eminent names, ranging from Laurie Rae Chamberlain and Derek Jarman to Richard Wentworth. However, it was in 1976, with the exhibition Castoro/67–68, that Bromm set the tone for his gallery’s future. Thereafter, Bromm mostly limited his curatorial concerns to contemporary and local artists, who ranged from Rosemarie Castoro to Mike Bidlo and Lucio Pozzi. Bromm abided by a straightforward critical standard: whether a prospective work captured his fancy. Rather than hewing to any particular aesthetic mode or theme, Bromm’s exhibitions have, ever since, been characterized by a catholic ethos—one often, though not exclusively, anchored by the artists living and working in downtown Manhattan of that epoch.

Bromm’s gallery has retained its unaffected and unvarnished commitment to working artists, often supporting them before they achieve popular acclaim. Particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, Bromm was known as an ecumenical mainstay for emerging and mid-career artists. The gallery’s syncretic sensibility is made evident in his fifty-year anniversary exhibition, 50: The View from Tribeca. This show consists of an abundant harvest of works executed by those artists—alive and deceased, venerated and obscure—who most regularly exhibited at the gallery. Like his forty-year exhibition, which also included Linda Francis, Jody Pinto, Lucio Pozzi, Alice Adams, Mac Adams, and Rick Prol, Bromm’s quinquagenary is resolutely eclectic. The gamut of styles ranges from Robert “Bobby G” Goldman’s colorfully outlined portraits to Terry Rosenberg’s arachnean abstractions, Carlos Alfonzo’s motley ceramics, Castoro’s Post-Minimal drawings, and Jean Foos’s packing materials limned with ad hoc patterns (to catalog but a small sampling). In addition to Castoro, Bromm’s show includes other familiar names, such as Keith Haring, Natalya Nesterova, Luis Frangella, and Carlos Alfonzo. Their works are punctuated by lesser-known artists, including Mark Golderman, Lorenza Sannai, and Joel Fisher.

The exhibition’s standout works mostly belong to the peripheral and unheralded contributors. A number of these gripping works conjure aesthetic tendencies from the 1970s and ’80s that today often remain overlooked. One of the strongest is Rick Prol’s wooden sculpture, Head (1983). Prol’s reposing wooden strips, dun and sere, are bound and repassed into the triangulated visage of a beak-faced man. His white almond eyes punctuate a trussed chin. The work effectively bespeaks the improvident conventions wielded by twentieth-century non- and anti-academic artists, dovetailing Purvis Young’s motley façades riven with aslant nails and Dan Basen’s wooden masks lined with canvas strips darted in flagging flat stains of color. Prol’s charmingly obscure study, quite unlike his neo-expressionistic figurative paintings, betrays the influence of American folk and itinerant art in its crazed, imperfect visage. This proclivity, epitomized by obscure woodworkers who belonged to the latter half of the twentieth century like Wayne Nowack and Barry Cohen, is but one of several esoteric inclinations that Bromm helped cultivate over the past five decades.

Cristos Gianakos’s unassuming open-faced aquamarine box, Pelagos (1979), is another curious relic. It recalls the “box art” genre, which, upon distinguishing itself from sculpture-in-the-round and easel painting, enjoyed significant attention during the 1960s, culminating in the Byron Gallery’s 1965 Box Show. Gianakos’s work exemplifies a minimal approach to “box art” that traffics in surface texture experiments. The cobalt’s lucent glow, vaulted in a barefronted prism, bounces off the enclosure’s inner sides, transforming paint into light.

Joel Fisher’s photographic-sculptural pairings are the highlight of the show. With sculpture A (2004–5), Study #1 (2003), and Study #2 (2004–5), Fisher transmogrifies unusual forms culled from the natural semblance into self-standing biomorphic sculptures. Isolating the outline of a snow mound or rain stain, Fisher’s approach is hued by a decidedly Romantic impulse. However, despite their organic source material, Fisher’s ensuant sculptures are ambiguous enough to bar any naturalist anchor from closing off other meanings. Study #1 consists of a photographic study and papier-mâché likeness; in the photo, a towering ice mast is outrivaled by a leaning permafrost minaret, the whole opaline structure lanced by a twig and gleaming blue-white like a glacial briar. The bifurcating shoots of this obscure object appear to be entombed in an iced-over embankment. Evoking snow-topped and ice-glazed shrubbery stiffened in a muslin floe, the aberrant structure strikes one as too cultivated to have organically occurred in nature. Fisher assiduously draws on this obscurity. In the correlative sculpture, Fisher reduces the form to a stump girdled by planar branches and topped with a crescent-shaped shell crown. In dramatizing the natural form and smoothing its edges, Fisher, exacting an act of sculptural conversion, congeals the arboreal form into stiffened hoary towers.

Similarly, in Study #2, Fisher finds a fruitful homology between nature viewed and molded. The photographic image is of a lizard-shaped profile patterned into the gray-speckled concrete footpath below. Whether the byproduct of a happenstance interplay of raking shadows or serendipitous rainfall, the outline is bewilderingly similar to a dinosaur rendered in silhouette. Lifting the figure’s contours into the three-dimensional world, Fisher derives a sculptural homology with rounded features, including an agape beak and nub tail. Fisher’s inventiveness consists in his dissolution of natural forms into pure structures and his subsequent transliteration of these into appropriate sculptural forms. Between each stage of this structural isomorphism, Fisher homes in on striking arrangements already coalesced in nature and apposite for aesthetic scrutiny.

Some of the works included in the anniversary show, such as Letty Nowak’s 2025 portrait of surfer Jeremy Flores, are less intellectually and optically stimulating. Principally, such inclusions demonstrate the breadth of Bromm’s variegated tastes. But such is to be expected from a group show including over fifty individual artworks. However, the great majority of the pieces in Bromm’s fifty-year anniversary exhibition are of significant artistic merit. At their best—as in Fisher’s case—they disclose highly original approaches deserving of further scholarly and curatorial consideration.