Lisa Alvarado’s Mystical Screens at Bridget Donahue

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg, July 17 – August 30, 2020, Bridget Donahue, New York, photo by Gregory Carideo, image copyright Lisa Alvarado, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC.

Thalweg is the third presentation of Chicago-based Lisa Alvarado with Bridget Donahue gallery on the Lower East Side. Here Alvarado touches on various themes, from geometric to political while continuing her exploration of abstraction through elaborately executed patterns. Presented works include nine acrylic-on-canvas pieces suspended in the air, two delicate sand structures, and several prints on aluminum. The exhibition is accompanied by hypnotic musical composition Thalweg Sounds by Natural Information Society, a musical band formed by Alvarado and her husband, and where she plays the harmonium. Taken as a whole, this show brings together an immersive and enticing experience, a walking meditation of contemplating through vision and sounds.

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Traditional Object), 2020, Acrylic, fabric, wood 74 × 88 in. (187.96 × 223.52 cm), photo by Tom Vaneynde, image copyright Lisa Alvarado, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC

Screen or byobu in Japanese is an element of the space organization; it’s also a movable painting, creating a virtual reality for its onlookers by symbolically multiplying the preexisting physical space. In its traditional use, painted Asian screens were created to hide something from a plain view or to create a partition. As a theatrical curtain, a screen can show something mysterious, outside of our own system of references. In the presented work Alvarado incorporates all these subtleties that a screen connotes while adding a few of her own.

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Traditional Object), 2020, acrylic on canvas, wood, 75 × 81 in.
(190.50 × 205.74 cm), photo by Tom Vaneynde, image copyright Lisa Alvarado, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC

The color scheme of the presented works runs a whole gamut from a gentle pastel combination of green, pink, and azure to a more forceful combination of cobalt blue, crimson, gold, olive green. A few pieces are created with precisely coordinated jagged structures, while others have a more immediate, fluid finish.  In one striking work, a rigid pattern of triangles suddenly encounters a smooth, organic line of a symbolic wave, thus following the premise of the exhibition exploring a meeting place of various layers and identities.

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg, July 17 – August 30, 2020, Bridget Donahue, New York, photo by Gregory Carideo, image copyright Lisa Alvarado, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC

According to the old Japanese beliefs, evil spirits could only move in straight lines, thus screens ritualistically were able to hinder the entrance of the negative energy. In almost conscious accordance with this belief, on the reverse side of the paintings, Alvarado silkscreened a watery outline of the fingers of two hands reaching towards one another on the yellow or white backgrounds. Acting as talismans these fingers reference for the artist a convergence, a connection between seen and unseen, contemplated and real, fixed and fluid.

Lisa Alvarado, Thalweg (Luna 4), 2020 Dye sublimation on aluminum 11 × 14 in. , (27.94 × 35.56 cm), photo by Tom Vaneynde, image copyright Lisa Alvarado, courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC

In her statement for the exhibition, Alvarado mentions the 1929-1936 Mexican Repatriation that violently changed the lives of over 2 million people of Mexican descent. This exhibition does not immediately strike me as having a precise goal of critically re-examining this human tragedy, although aluminum sheets provide us with significant visual aids. Rather as Ariadne, Alvarado inventively guides us with her pictorial and musical threads so we could possibly contemplate various states of mind, connecting with those of the Repatriation victims, but also with meditatively inclined spiritual querents. In both instances, an exercise we all need this summer.

 

Lisa Alvarado: Thalweg at Bridget Donahue

July 17–August 30, 2020

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Nina Mdivani

Nina Mdivani is Tbilisi-born and New York-based curator, writer, and researcher. Over the past seven years, Mdivani has participated in various projects, panels, critiques, and juries connected to the contemporary visual arts with a focus on women artists, Eastern Europe, intergenerational trauma, and the erasure of culture. She has curated over ten exhibitions in New York, Germany, Georgia, and Latvia. Mdivani’s articles have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, JANE Magazine Australia, NERO Editions Italy, Eastern European Film Bulletin Berlin, XIBT Contemporary Art Magazine Berlin, White Hot Magazine New York, Arte & Lusso Dubai, and others. Her books include: “Anna Valdez: Natural Curiosity” (Paragon Books, Berkeley, CA 2019), “King is Female: Three Georgian Artists” (Wienand Verlag, Berlin 2018), “Lechaki: Photography of Daro Sulakauri” (ERTI Gallery, Georgia 2018), “The Science, Religion, and Culture of Georgia A Concise and Illustrated History” (NOVA Science Publishing, New York 2017). In September 2022 Mdivani became Senior Director at Black Wall Street Gallery, Chelsea.

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