visual art review
Wade Wilson Art Anne Appleby and Maddy Rosenberg
Two very different yet subtly similar painters are on display at Wade Wilson Art in Houston. Anne Appleby, a minimalist color fi eld painter, and Maddy Rosenberg, a sort of miniature realist, make for strange and wonderful bedfellows. The show is a testament to the gallery’s curatorial inspiration and insight, revealing a real knack for juxtaposing seemingly disparate approaches to what ends up being a remarkably coherent ensemble. The show marks Appleby’s fi rst exhibition in Houston, though her work is well known nationally and 50
beyond. The artist comes from the Concrete school of painting that employs Bauhaus ideals in the execution of minimal panels of color unheeded by content such as representation (or any other formal distraction). The paintings can be read as a sort of materialization of a James Turrel light installation. They have a glowing effect that is deceptively simple. The former Bay Area resident now lives and works in Montana, an environment that would seem a perfect inspirational setting for the artist’s epic displays. Her paintings somehow refl ect an endless horizon of atmosphere,
the canvases big sky vignettes. Though Appleby’s scale is not monumental, her panels contain in them a confi dence not found in many other “heroic” sized paintings of the Twentieth century. In Prairie Cottonwoods, a spaced triptych depicting three shades of green incrementally getting darker, the artist makes great use of a simple presentation. The panels are fi ve feet tall and together measure almost eight feet across, which sounds larger than the works come across. However, Appleby is able to create a sustained presence in the work through her treatment