On any given day, galleries are better able than museums to show artists in depth, so that the subjects and treatments each prefers can be clearly seen. Sometimes a single venue places two such artists side-by-side, allowing useful comparisons, and at other times it’s necessary to travel between […]
Walking into Allen and Alan Fine Art—(or ‘A’ Gallery, as it’s generally known)—it’s clear you’re stepping into a space that reveres artwork. Past the desk, on the left, two large-scale paintings by Jennifer Rasmusson draw you in with a subtle yet dignified seduction. The space, lit by natural […]
An art gallery which contains a courtyard with water and fish (as ‘A’ Gallery does) can run a show called You Animal and succeed in a way those without a “water feature” cannot. Consider the magic and necessary pull of water, whether in drought conditions, or not: settlements/towns/cities […]
It’s just all so much — the contrasting palettes and swirling forms, the scraped, stained and splattered paint, the disembodied heads and piercing shafts of color. It’s the maximalist expressionism of Matthew Choberka, this month at ‘A’ Gallery. The Weber State University professor has always practiced a style […]
The puzzle throb in the work by painter Steven Stradley at “A” Gallery is asking for solution, and, at the same time, for no solution but gravity. You feel drop from North to South, continual ambitious crossing from East to West. And back. And, unraveledness, exasperation. Through them […]
“There is much in the scenery to admire; mountain rising above mountain, precipice rising above precipice.” — Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour: Beyond the Rocky Mountains in 1835 How do you review mountains, or paintings of mountains? Mountains too formidably, completely, contain all opposites: in paintings, every […]
“To live in these times is in a lot of ways scary, and in all of my recent works I’m working to acknowledge that, and to overcome it,” says Ogden artist Matthew Choberka, whose paintings are ablaze with nearly-neon color, informed abstraction, and monstrous figures that push, […]
As you approach the sunlit clerestory of Salt Lake City’s A Gallery, the first of Toni Doilney’s paintings you see, “Old Town,” prepares you for the dare and ski-run of all these paintings — a rising and falling series of moving terrestrial lines, suggesting terracing, the magic of […]
Linnie Brown’s approximately two dozen pieces in her show Retrace at A Gallery, with titles like “Often Requires Additional Building,” “Need Only to Reattach,” and “The Line Between Now and Then,” make you think of nothing more than — what if all these paintings, with their flanges and […]
There is a neat taking-off trick here: two of Jennifer Rasmusson’s back-in-time representational paintings are here, separated from her New Abstracts now filling A Gallery’s white-on-white indoor sky-lit courtyard area. The pre-abstract “Collection of Blues” is eye-level; it’s very large; one bloom is the size of your head. […]
In his new exhibit, Ryoichi Suzuki’s carved, flowing forms of wood and stone punctuate two rooms in Salt Lake City’s A Gallery. In each sculpture on display, Suzuki uses different types of stone or wood to produce elongated and graceful organic forms. A native of Japan, Suzuki’s subjects […]
After a game of cribbage and a glass or two of Cointreau, my grandfather was apt to rise and recite from “As You Like It”: And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in […]
In the century and a half since photography rose up to challenge painting as an image source, artists have invented countless strategies for incorporating photos into their working methods. Some use snapshots to replace the traditional sketch book. Others primarily paint things they could never see in person, […]
Getting to Jeff Juhlin’s studio on Salt Lake City’s west side is an adventure, something of which the artist – nationally known for his encaustic and mixed-media work—is well aware. “You were only five minutes late,” he says with a smile. “The guy who came to see me […]
As she prepares for a new solo exhibit at Salt Lake’s A Gallery, it is refreshing to hear her Wynter Jones say, ‘I’m not as pissed off as I used to be.’
by Tom Hunter Royden Card roams the deserts of Utah with a sketchbook, carving art from the rugged redrock landscape. Winds, rocks and sun are his silent partners as he explores the desert, looking for inspiration. Then, an ocotillo plant shivers in the breeze and waves its long […]
A Gallery is big – on sculpture. The new group sculpture show at A Gallery features many of the area’s finest sculptors. Represented in this knock-out exhibit are artists David Adams, Brian Berman, Laurie Burns, Brian Christensen, Anne Gregerson, John Haley III, Deborah Jong, Nnamdi Okonkwo, Ed Pogue, […]
The current and exciting exhibit at the new A Gallery in the Sugarhouse area features the artwork of Trevor Southey and is provocative, new, retrospective and collaborative. This particular presentation is unique in that it is the result of collaboration and commission, creativity and entrepreneurism, awareness and […]
