McKenzie Fine Art Presents 'Reader's Delight,' 6/24-8/6

McKenzie Fine Art (511 West 25th Street) announces its summer group exhibition called "Reader's Delight." It features painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper by the following artists: Richard Baker, Mary Ellen Bartley, Erica Baum, Tom Burckhardt, Matthew Higgs, Maira Kalman, Jean Lowe, Martin McMurray, Abelardo Morell, Yohei Nishimura, Mamiko Otsubo, Donna Ruff, and Mickey Smith. The exhibition opens on Thursday, June 24th with a reception for the artists from 6 to 8 p.m. and runs through Friday, August 6, 2010.

Summer is traditionally associated with reading for enjoyment, as a time to indulge in the guilty pleasures of best-sellers and how-to guides, as well as an opportunity to tackle lengthy literary tomes. The advent of digitized books and e-readers promises to transform reading by threatening the tangible qualities of the book with obsolescence. The familiar physical properties of books that reassure many readers are increasingly seen as hopelessly old-fashioned: shape, weight, cover design, typography, illustration, layout, smell, as well as the infinite vastness or tender intimacy of libraries and bookshelves.

This exhibition explores some of the myriad ways artists express their reverence and affection for books and the act of reading. Several of the artists use actual books as an object to be altered, transfigured, and re-read, exemplified in very different forms in Matthew Higgs' conceptual transformations of framed and isolated abstract book cover designs, Mamiko Otsubo's enigmatic masks collaged from the pages and covers of art history books, Donna Ruff's Rorschach-like patterns burned on the pages of Freud, Tom Burckhardt's re-purposed book covers used as grounds for his fanciful paintings, and Yohei Nishimura's kiln-fired de-accessioned books, shrunken and shriveled into fragile and lightweight wasp's nests of bound leaves and cover. In other works, artists isolate and transform aspects of book design and its systems of classification, as in Mary Ellen Bartley's Morandi-like anonymous stacks of paperback volumes, Erica Baum's poetic transformations of digitized indices and page edges, and Mickey Smith's monumentalized isolation of luxuriant leather book spines. Other artists create real or imaginary author portraits, as in Maira Kalman's affectionate images of famous books and writers and Martin McMurray's full-scale faux books replete with enigmatic titles and quirky and humorous author portraits. Richard Baker celebrates book design and typography in his gouache images of paperback books, Abelardo Morell conflates a crammed domestic bookshelf with a Tuscan landscape in his camera obscura image, and Jean Lowe creates ersatz books and images of libraries as vehicles for social critique and humor. What unites these artists is their veneration of the book as both a physical form and as a conceptual font of wisdom and insight.

Gallery hours in June are Tuesday - Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; on Saturdays the gallery opens at 11 a.m. In July and August, the gallery will be closed on Saturdays except by appointment; Mondays are also by appointment. We will close for vacation after August 6, and reopen with an exhibition of new work by Tom Leaver on September 10, 2010.

Photo Credit: Richard Baker, The Job, 2005

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