Mark Jenkins | December 10, 2024
The math is a bit more complicated in "Two X" than the Hemphill Artworks group show's title suggests. The selection presents 14 artists (six of them deceased) paired as seven duos. Several of the contributors, however, are represented by multiple works. Also, some of the pieces -- all made between 1960 and 2024 -- speak articulately to ones to which they're not officially linked.
Wayson R. Jones's "Kinshasa," for example, is an abstract 3D painting, rendered in two tones of blue, that's offered in dialogue with an untitled Leon Berkowitz picture whose soft, flat hues flow from blue to red to yellow. But the craggy relief forms in Jones's painting suggest the wave and criss-cross patterns in two white-on-white Robin Rose sculptural pictures. And Rose's icy palette harmonizes with the minimalism of a Ruri Yi painting that neatly arrays 12 lozenges in close shades of white and off-white.