Valerie Gladstone, review, ARTnews, March 2000
Sandra Lerner: Breath
Sandra Lerner's paintings seem to float in air like elusive
clouds. Lerner achieves her quietly captivating effects by combining
Eastern and Western influences. Having studied calligraphy with
Japanese masters and adopted Taoism and the teachings of the
Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, she has also embraced many of the
techniques of Abstract Expressionism. Lerner begins, Jackson
Pollock-style, by pouring and painting on immense unstretched
linen canvases placed on the floor. She then cuts out sections
and starts painting on them, sometimes adding sand and dust
to achieve shine and translucency. Delicate lines and boxes
and markings that look like writing but are not interrupt the
overall fluidity of her paintings.
Lerner aptly called this show "Empty and Full." Most
of the six works, titled Breath, from I to VI, are fairly large
(72 by 58 inches), and all are painted in muted neutral tones.
They are full of detail—lines that give the illusion of
being birds in flight, mountain ridges, streams—and yet
they are spacious enough to allow viewers to dream. Breath VI,
for example, commands attention with two smudged gray circles
and a wavering line against a pale beige background, while wisps
of color float like half-remembered thoughts.
—Valerie Gladstone, 2000
view all of Sandra Lerner's Breath
paintings
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