ROBERT NOVEL PAINTINGS Reviewed in The Washington Post
by Mark Jenkins
The Washington Post Sunday Arts, Gallery Reviews
August 7, 2022
The paintings in the Robert Novel retrospective at Hemphill Artworks are austere and geometric, yet also playful. Nearly all the untitled abstracts are black and white, but they’re in multiple shades of those hues, and occasionally include planks of gray. And though the forms are simple, straightedge and mostly quadrilateral, they’re handled in ways that hint at 3D perspective. The paintings were made between 2015 and 2020 by Novel, a longtime Washingtonian who died in 2021.