MUCH IS HAPPENING at or beneath the surface in the work of three artists currently featured in local galleries, Rosemary Feit Covey, Diane Szczepaniak, and Gabe Brown. Feit Covey's style is the chunkiest, with dense compositions that burrow into the canvas or array found objects on top of it. Szczepaniak's approach yields the flattest pictures, yet they're constructed from thousands of translucent layers that simulate seeming depths. While Brown's motifs are also rendered in two dimensions, they float atop heavily worked fields that appear as much excavated as painted.
“Touch Me If You Dare,” Rosemary Feit Covey (Courtesy Morton Fine Art)
As in her previous exhibitions at Morton Fine Art, Feit Covey ponders threats to the environment in works that emulate the fruitfulness of the natural world. The show's title, "Thanatopsis," comes from an early-19th-century William Cullen Bryant poem. The word literally means a view of death, but the artworks overflow with life. They're vital if not necessarily pretty, as exemplified by two pieces that teem with hundreds of pictures of flies.
The Johannesburg-born D.C. artist's dense, intricate creations combine printmaking, painting and sculpture. The imagery sometimes suggests microbial forms, and the collages incorporate thread, string, and glitter. "Descartes Died in the Snow" (the title of a previous Feit Covey show at Morton) integrates recycled-plastic shreds and places renderings of hard-edged triangle and a human eye and brain amid snowflake-like abstractions. Made partly of hand-formed acrylic, the blood-hued "Touch Me If You Dare" is entirely sculptural, with black fibers that protrude outside the rectangular frame.
The most flamboyantly three-dimensional pieces are two titled "Thanatopsis" and numbered II and III. Like most of these works, the pair feature black backdrops, while juxtaposing wood engravings with clusters of red, white and gray fibers that evoke everything from plant tendrils to human nerves and sinews. These views of death don't evoke a morgue, however. Instead, they suggest a fecund rainforest where lifeless matter is promptly repurposed into new existence.
“Untitled,” Diane Szczepaniak (Courtesy Gallery Neptune & Brown and Diane Szczepaniak)
THE LATE DIANE SZCZEPANIAK (1956-2019) is probably best known as a sculptor who orchestrated light and shadow. Luminosity is also key to the Washington-area artist's watercolors, about 20 of which are on exhibit in Gallery Neptune & Brown's "Meditations on Color and Light." Among these pictures are a few that exult in a full spectrum of colors. But most feature just two hues, and occasionally only one. (The show also includes an oil, which despite a similarly limited palette is quite unlike the other paintings.)
Made between 1994 and 2015, the watercolors suggest Mark Rothko's paintings on paper, while their aqueous quality recalls Morris Louis's acrylic-stained canvases. Like the work of those predecessors, Szczepaniak's is simultaneously minimalist and lush. Simple as their compositions are, her paintings don't feel austere.
Almost half of the show's entries are in the "Dwelling" series, which were partly inspired by views of sea, sky, and land the artist experienced on a visit to Australia. These pictures frame a rectangular block of soft color within an L-shaped partial border, rendered in a different but often closely related hue. The porous doorways suggest portals to the sublime.
Less formatted but just as lustrous are a trio of paintings in which melded overlapping brushstrokes -- the title of one calls them "waves" -- coverage on a barely defined horizontal seam that bisects the all-over color field. These pictures are essentially a single hue, although yellow and pale blue undergird the dominant green of "After the Rain No. 6." That piece is the clearest illustration of the artist's layering technique. It's also altogether characteristic of Szczepaniak's ability to evoke light, landscape, and distance with nothing more than tightly arrayed streaks of watery color.
“Fringe,” Gabe Brown (Courtesy of Adah Rose Gallery)
HARDER-EDGED THAN Feit Covey's shapes and Szczepaniak's colors, Gabe Brown's repeated forms include cascades of droplets, usually black, and fan-like figures rendered in rainbow colors. But these features occupy relatively small portions of the paintings in "Winter Silence, Midnight Sun, North Star, Noonday Night," the upstate New York artist's Adah Rose Gallery show.
Heavily worked surfaces are around and seemingly beneath Brown's black beads, multi-colored fans, and free-floating bracket-like lines. The backdrops are painted in oil that's often partly scraped away. The resulting patterns suggest wood grain or water stains, and sometimes make the linen canvases look like battered planks. While sporadic drips and spots reveal the pigment's liquid quality, the earth- or water-toned backgrounds appear to be carved with tools and perhaps weathered by time.
This approach is familiar from previous Brown shows at the gallery. What's new is that some of her recent paintings are bigger than before, which accentuates the sense that they're sprawling landscapes or vast seascapes. The foregrounded motifs are as emphatic as ever, yet seem newly fragile. Brown's abstract worlds seem ready to engulf everything within them.
Rosemary Feit Covey: Thanatopsis
Through Oct. 4 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, #302. mortonfineart.com. 202-628-2787. Open by appointment.
Diane Szczepaniak: Meditations on Color and Light
Through Oct. 19 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.
Gabe Brown: Winter Silence, Midnight Sun, North Star, Noonday Night
Through Oct. 31 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington. adahrosegallery.com. 301-922-0162.