Galleries - March 2010

12. GALLERIES MARCH 10 The March show at Alan Cristea Gallery has to be seen as a major event, the first large-scale retrospective of the prints of Bauhaus artist and designer Anni Albers (b1899). Coming to fame at the Bauhaus for her work as a gifted and hugely influential textile designer, Albers only turned to printmaking comparatively late in life. Withsource and archive material loaned from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and nearly every print she ever made on show, she emerges here as an absolute master of this medium as well, endlessly and richly inventive. A nni Albers ‘Second Movement II’ Over the last 10 years or so Lisa Wright’s large and ambitious paintings have mined the intriguing and distinctly autobiographical theme of her own children’s childhood – at the swimming pool, on the beach etc – with an acute and unsentimental directness. Now, as they begin to enter early puberty, trickier issues of sexuality and psychological independ- ence begin to surface, Wright’s unceasingly painterly honesty of vision gives to them a subtly nuanced sense of dream and exultation, intuitive and without any hint of exploitativeness. ( Beardsmore ). Lisa Wright ‘Into the Light’ 2009 Arguably Robin Richmond’s most single-minded exhibition, Stones of the Sky at Curwen draws on her enormous expertise as a painter of nature, to show her at her most elemental. Richmond’s influences will speak for themselves, but forget that: this collection is a tour de force , in which the sights and scents of existence, the real essences, atmosphere, the sea- sons and many other areas of sensory perception have their collars felt, in evanescent visions of land and water. Richmond’s habitual attentive- ness to tone and palette is prominent, to magical effect. [Julian Freeman] R obin Richmond ‘Giudecca from the Zattere, Venice (Night)’ Australian-born and trained as an architect, Raymond Brownell has spent most of his life working in Europe and it was in Paris in 1969, at an exhi- bition of the great Swiss Constructivist, Max Bill, that he had the seminal artistic experience which has, over the last decade or so, come to domi- nate his life as a painter. Basing his art on clear mathematical principles – Fibonacci Sequence, Latin Squares and the like – the results are far from dry and formulaic as Brownell arrives at an exhilarating and intensely sat- isfying artistic conclusion, satisfying both mind and senses ( GX Gallery ). Raymond Brownell ‘One Black & 5 Greys’ 2008 (detail) THUMB nails Nicholas Usherwood