Drawings, Collages, and a Book
Works on paper by Ingeborg ten Haeff, Daewoong Nam, and Roisin Bateman go on view Thursday, May 10, at the Nabi Gallery in Chelsea. A reception from 6 to 8 that evening will double as a publication party for Ten Haeff Drawings, a book appearing under the imprint of Nabi Press. The gallery is at 137 West 25th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues, and hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 to 6. The show runs through June 16.
Ingeborg ten Haeff's career spans the better part of a century, three continents, and a variety of media. She was honored last year with a solo exhibition at the Städlisches Museum in her native town of Wesel, Germany. In the current show she is represented by a dozen drawings dating from the 1960s and '70s. Abstract in style, mysterious in mood, they work to evoke the inner nature of some particular personality, emotion, or relationship.
Ingeborg ten Haeff, Head, pencil, ink,
crayon and gouache on paper, 14x12, 1967In the course of an adventurous life, the artist migrated from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro and thence to New York and Amagansett, L.I., traveled widely in the Americas and Asia, and befriended many of the 20th century’s leading creative figures. In the 1950s and '60s her paintings began to win recognition at galleries and museums in the New York area, and she has had numerous shows in the decades since, most recently in the Wesel retrospective and at the Nabi in 2004. The critic Harold Rosenberg called her work “an extraordinary kind of inward thinking.” She lives in Greenwich Village, in an art-filled apartment on Washington Square, and will be present at the reception May 10.
She is joined in the new show by two younger artists with contrasting backgrounds and styles. Rosin Bateman grew up in Ireland, on the Connemara coast, and has lived for the past 20 years in Sag Harbor, L.I. Her work is abstract but reflects the moods and textures of these very different landscapes.
Roisin Bateman, untitled, 6.5x5.5, mixed media on paper
The drawings of Daewoong Nam, a Korean artist who spent much of the last decade working in New York, are highly realistic in technique but, as obsessive meditations on objects and faces in isolation from their normal context, achieve a surreal, dreamlike effect. Reviewing Nam's paintings in a previous Nabi show, the critic Robert Long called them "utterly magical," displaying a method "subtler than Magritte's."
Daewoong Nam, Nor Is This a Pipe, pencil drawing, 4x6, 2007
In addition to the drawings of Ingeborg ten Haeff and Daewoong Nam and the collages of Roisin Bateman, the show will include one painting by each artist. Copies of the new book Ten Haeff Drawings will be available at the gallery.
