ASSOCIATED AMERICAN ARTISTS

Nine years ago, Gloria Garfinkel bought a postcard of a Hiroshige woodcut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this19th-century work, depicting a colored fan against a blue and white background, she found the inspiration and the design motif for her current series of paintings, developed over the past three years. What fascinated her most in Hiroshige's work was the juxtaposition of soft, traditional fan patterns with modern, almost stark blue and white stripes. Like some of her previous works in her series "Haiku for the Eyes," these can be seen as visual meditations on the kimono. And, like the kimono, which always takes the body shape and movements of the wearer, they have a fluid vitality.

Garfinkel paints brilliant, blurred splotches of color in organic shapes and then attaches them to a background of blue and white stripes on a raised, layered canvas on board. The cut of the blue and white outer ring is irregular, but the tondo and diamond-shape pieces have the same matrix. By shifting the matrix, she alters the composition. For the current show, Garfinkel made 14 works, several of them six feet in diameter, and a few small monotypes.

Taking Japanese culture as her springboard, Garfinkel combines its traditions with her own drive to experiment. Often she adds found elements-for instance, textured wallpaper she bought on a trip to Russia and unused cloth from a previous painting. Her works always convey the impression of collage, even when they are not. Nothing lies flat or stays still: in fact, the juxtaposition of the regular and irregular shapes creates optical illusions. Kiku 5 calls to mind a blossom lying on a stark blue and white grate. In Kiku 1 and Kiku 4, the central organic shapes, composed of blurred, delicate patterns, look like warm, inviting planets flying through a bright, vertically striped sky.

— Valerie Gladstone