Pioneer Project & Mothers and Daughters
Jennifer Nehrbass: Pioneer Project & Madeleine Bialke: Mothers and Daughters
Visions West Contemporary
2605 Walnut Street, Denver, CO 80205
December 11, 2020-January 22, 2021
Review by Jillian Blackwell
Stepping off of a snowy street on a gray winter day, one is grateful for the two vibrant shows currently on view at Visions West Contemporary. Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass and Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke create intriguing and colorful worlds to enter into.
Jennifer Nehrbass, Punk Mountain Green, 2020, oil on canvas, 38 x 38 inches, and Punk Mountain Pink, 2020, oil on canvas, 38 x 28 inches. Images courtesy of Visions West Contemporary.
Pioneer Project by Jennifer Nehrbass is a collection of landscape paintings, portraits of women, and small sculptures. In her artist statement, Nehrbass attempts to organize these disparate subjects and media under a theme that envisions western expansion from a female perspective. However, upon inspection, this overarching concept seems less like a cohesive premise and more like a pretext that seems unnecessary, as each group of work has aesthetic merit within itself, and is pleasant to view.
Jennifer Nehrbass, Rosie, 2020, oil on canvas, 48 x 30 inches. Image courtesy of Visions West Contemporary.
Nehrbass paints large, colorful, dreamy landscapes. Each painting is a color story within itself. There is much attention to shape and edge relationships, giving a push and pull to assumed backgrounds and foregrounds. Some of the landscapes have flat stripes of bright colors, reminiscent of a television’s “no signal” screen. In addition to these landscapes, Nehrbass has included individual portraits of beautiful female “characters.” The women’s heads and hands are painted in a realistic, dimensional style, contrasting with torsos of flat patterns and solid black backgrounds. In the title of each piece, the women are given a single name such as Rosie or Priscilla and look like young fashion models. They are paired with bold, graphic patterns and it does not take too much imagination to envision the paintings as fashion spreads in Vogue or Elle. With both the landscapes and the portraits, one can see Nehrbass’s eye for design. The paintings are beautifully crafted, skillfully painted, and thoughtfully composed.
Despite the clear technical skill, this reviewer struggled to see the connection between the paintings and the artist statement’s thesis. Perhaps the landscapes nod to the pioneer West by depicting epic mountainous scenes à la Thomas Moran or Albert Bierstadt. However, the landscapes’ connection to the portraits appears to be through a shared visual language, not content. Framing the women in these portraits as “the explorers and the documentarians,” or claiming that “[t]hey represent the bravery of all who venture in to [sic] the unknown to create a better life” seems without ground and detracts from the aesthetic virtue evident throughout. To this reviewer they simply appear to be archetypal depictions of female beauty.
Jennifer Nehrbass, Cairn 2, 2019, wood with stone assemblage, 17 x 9 x 8 inches. Image courtesy of Visions West Contemporary.
Nehrbass’s sculptures are the most distilled and successful. Titled as “cairns,” each is a balanced stack of wood and stone. The components are painted or stained mostly in a single color, and are either uniformly matte or glossy. The highly finished surfaces, geometric forms, and ample use of black and white are reminiscent of Brancusi’s totemic sculptures. Mixing this aesthetic with the cairn assemblage makes for a nice combination of high and low. The idea behind these sculptures seems fully conceived and their simplicity is refreshing.
Madeleine Bialke, Two Slow Dancers, 2020, oil on canvas, 32 x 28 inches. Image courtesy of Visions West Contemporary.
After walking through Nehrbass’s world of black, white, phthalo green, and magenta, one comes upon the paintings included in Mothers and Daughters by Madeleine Bialke, another world unto itself portrayed mainly through the contrasting complementary colors blue and orange. Bialke’s paintings not only have a strong color palette, but also demonstrate great attention to surface and paint handling. All these things work together to create a compelling narrative within each painting, which in turn imbues the entire show with a cogent story that holds the viewer’s attention from painting to painting.
Madeleine Bialke, Child Prodigy, 2020, oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches. Image courtesy of Visions West Contemporary.
In her artist statement, Bialke cites the “old-growth forest called the Five Ponds Wilderness area” in the Adirondack Mountains as inspiration. Bialke has taken elements she encountered within the natural world and turned them into her own personal symbols whose meanings must be divined (with some assistance from the titles). In Two Slow Dancers, the viewer can immediately identify the dancers as the two tall trees in the middle of the composition, whose curving bough shapes reach toward each other. In Child Prodigy, a single sapling stands in the middle of the composition, with the rest of the painting serving as backdrop. The anthropomorphic sapling sways slightly to the left, in a seemingly humble gesture, as it is dwarfed by the trunk of the perhaps parental tree behind it. Each painting’s mysterious narrative could be contemplated without end.
Madeleine Bialke, Lady of the Lake, 2020, oil on canvas, 32 x 28 inches. Image courtesy of Visions West Contemporary.
Most of these paintings have a light source coming from below, further amplifying their theatricality. In color, most begin with the intense complementary relationship of blue and orange, then riff from there, bringing in teals, pale purples, and startling pinks like the strip of far-off mountains that cut horizontally across the composition of Lady of the Lake. The grain of the canvas is not evident in the surface of the paintings, which are quite smooth. This allows for the small brushstrokes around edges of color fields to stand out, calling attention to the craft and beauty of Bialke’s painting. Bialke’s forest is captivating in the same way that Henri Rousseau's jungle scenes are.
Both Nehrbass and Bialke show technical skill, but they approach content in very different ways. The lively colors of each artists’ work wash over the viewer, who can bask in the beauty of Nehrbass’s work and wonder at the mystery and tenderness of Bialke’s narratives. Pioneer Project and Mothers and Daughters are certainly worth a visit and are a welcome change to the dull, colorless winter.
Jillian Blackwell is a Denver-based artist and art educator. She holds a BA in Fine Arts with a Concentration in Ceramics from the University of Pennsylvania.
