Preservation
In ‘Tubach + Tubach’ exhibit, father and daughter display an individual stewardship for culture and environment B Y DAV I D T H O M P S O N
T
art
hough significantly different in style, subject and You can feel the forces of composition, for instance, in Altone, artists Allan and Lisa Tubach, father and lan’s “Shadows on Stone,” in which a cascade of commercial daughter, share a similar family trait and theme: ephemera (a gas-station logo, a bakery sign, a smiling Evean interest in capturing aspects of the world that, like figure with a few apples to sell) spills from the upper-right for different reasons, are on the verge of disappearance. corner of the painting to the lower left. Hence, a fitting title for Gallery 1516’s current exhibition, This bisects the image as a whole into two triangles, one a Tubach + Tubach: Preservation, which continues through piece of classical architecture, a remnant of past order, and Nov. 27. the other a surprising display of minimalist painterliness, with Yet, while Lisa and Allan have been exploring issues of three slices of color (earth-tone, beige, and white) stacked one preservation in their work for years, their personal interests on top of one another. and stories have taken them into different directions: enviPerhaps because her subject matter is organic, most of ronmental sustainability for her and cultural heritage for him. Lisa’s paintings seem to emanate outward from a throbbing However, knowing of their separate stewardship alone does heart, a collection of shapes and colors that is more comnot do justice to their individual take on vivid, dramatic and pacted than the image as a whole. detailed imagery. This is most clear in “Humming/Sudden,” in which this Lisa is an Omaha-born, Virginia-based artist who has been throbbing heart (shaped vaguely like the head of a lamb) is showing locally (primarily through the Anderson O’Brien Gal- emphasized by its juxtaposition with a more sparsely populery) and around the country since the early 1990s. lated area of canvas and crisscrossed by drips of paint. She is following in the footsteps of her father, Allan, who Allan’s paintings draw on Italian Futurism’s love affair with has been active since the 1970s. Many of his works have urbanism and motion. Indeed, his paintings are most persuafound their way into institutional and corporate collections, sive when they draw on Futurism’s angularity to direct the ennot to mention the Nebraska governor’s mansion. ergy of his paintings to a point of sharp convergence where The differences between these two painters are immediate. modernity, commercialism, and perception come together. Allan’s paintings consist almost entirely of fractured portrayals In “Full Circle,” for instance, the portico of Omaha’s J.P. Cook of a man-made world: buildings, windows, signage, sculpture. building and one of the glass faces of the Holland Center slice Lisa’s paintings, on the other hand, derive much of their through the space of the painting and collide at a point where imagery from nature and from the sea in particular. Her paint- a neon “Open” sign and reverberations of light suggest that ings are crowded with plants, animals, and the movements of we have stumbled upon of those moments when life in the city water and air. offers a fusion of abstract shapes or surreal life forms. There is also a difference in palette that is pronounced, parIn “Cloud Columns” from 1991, two slices of sky sweep ticularly when these paintings face each other across Gallery down from above, met by a stretch of highway markings that 1516’s generous space. Allan’s colors are often pale, in part at first converge but then curve and swoop in a manner that because so much of the cityscape they portray is grey and in throws the view back into the space of the painting. part because the colors are frequently viewed through one Given that Allan is driven by an interest in dynamism and another and thus must exhibit some transparency as they con- change, it is odd that there are very few signs in his painting verge in a jumble of perceptions. of actual decay of the kind that can seem depressing: rusty Whether she is working in oil, acrylic, or gouache, Lisa’s metal, peeling paint, litter, crumbling infrastructure, etc. His colors tend to be more dark and intense, from the wafting scenes are attractive and carnivalesque, swirling around the greens and blues of “Reverie (I Am You, You Are Me)” to the view rather than leaving him or her feeling alien or displaced. purple and red conflagration that flies up the middle of the There are no humans in Lisa Tubach’s work, and aside from 2010 work “For the Smallest Among Us.” a few fish there aren’t any animals either. What there is is enWhat brings these painters together is the quest — shared ergy in the form of interlocking cellular shapes in bold colors with perhaps all painters — to decide how to organize the that are usually meant to represent coral reefs and other natuswirl of objects and sensations that each seeks to capture. ral forms. In a recent, large (60” x 48”) oil painting entitled Both are faced with the question of how to compose their im- “While We Are Sleeping,” the top half of the painting is taken ages, even when the goal is to portray a moment that exists up by the water’s surface, which in its undulations catches beyond representation. only hints of the tempest of orange and red going on below.
30
NOVEMBER 2016
continued on page 32 y
| THE READER |
art