Mary Elizabeth Hrbacek “Metamorphoses”
Joyce B. Korotkin
Mary Hrbacek’s finely honed but dramatic charcoal drawings inform the basis of her paintings in this exhibition of recent works.
The drawings in particular hover on a razor sharp edge between figuration and abstraction, and indeed seem to morph from one to the other before one’s eyes. Hrbacek creates these hallucinatory illusions through an exquisite use of line combined with shadow and light. Undulating organic forms twist and writhe across the surfaces, volumes here and recessive dark spaces there, loosely alluding through their freely stroked dark outlines to natural things. Vague impressions of the snaking branches of trees morph into veins, tendriled crustaceans, dancing torsos, body organs, bones, and monster faces with glaring eyes. As in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” an altemate universe is created in which things appear to be familiar and yet are not what they seem.
Formally, the work is strong, dynamically composed within the allotted space, and intended to be fully realized works in their own right rather than preliminary sketches, which is often the province of drawings that are utilized as the basis for paintings.
The paintings play with line and illusion in much the same way, yet have a markedly different effect. Flatter, they are more involved with pattern and surface than with deeply recessive space. Here the element of color – mostly brilliant but slightly off and muted like that of a dusky sunset – takes precedence over line and shape. Resembling oil, they are actually sealed (varnished) gouache, a medium in which color takes on saturated hues and densely opaque, velvety surfaces. Hrbacek’s turquoise, cobalt blues, golds, pinks and corals take full advantage of the medium’s innate radiance.
“Pursuit I” and “II” are small gems in which Hrbacek’s formal elements of line, shape, color and surface coalesce. In these works, line mediates perfectly with the gestural, poetic ground, evoking figures and forests but specifying nothing.
In some of the larger paintings, such as “Drum Beat,” one can find a new direction that the artist has begun to explore. Placed over the images are the artist’s hand prints, as well as her name printed out in block letters repetitively, seemingly sneaking in from the side and encroaching upon the space. These elements are not incorporated into the imagery but rather march resolutely onto it like advance scouts. According to the artist, they are intentional statements that affirm self; a way for the artist behind the art to come out of the shadows of anonymity and quite literally show her hand.
