Galleries - Kenneth Baker

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Schneider at Braunstein/Quay: Ursula Schneider, an alumna of the San Francisco Art Institute, may think of herself with some justification as a latecomer to the Hudson River School of landscape painters.

Now a resident of upstate New York, Schneider based the paintings in her show at Braunstein/Quay on memories and photographs of the Indian Point nuclear plant, seen at night from across the Hudson.

Her 19th century predecessors might not even recognize Schneider's pictures as landscapes. She describes vistas in which pillarlike reflections of the plant's security lights streak the river's surface, broken by passing barge traffic.

The work of contemporaries such as Alex Katz and Yvonne Jacquette - both of whom like night scenes - echo more clearly in Schneider's art than any 19th century visionaries of the American sublime. Her paintings anticipate viewers with an affinity for abstract painting. The abstract form of Schneider's paintings and their distinctive material quality - fluid media on a nylon laminate that she devised - cancel most of her subject's picturesque qualities.

Only her practice of making one a month invites scenic engagement, as it ambiguously registers seasonal changes. Despite their technical solidity, Schneider's paintings seem to emit less energy than she has put into them.

Published on 29 July 2009 by David Roth

"March Hudson River", 2007, pigment and urethane on laminated nylon; 45 x 92"

Painter Ursula Schneider has made a career out of rendering the quotidian extraordinary, and in "The River", her latest series of nocturnal waterscapes on view at the Braunstein/Quay Gallery through August 1, she continues to apply  a virtuoso technique to her surroundings, this time in upstate New York.  Working from photographs, Schneider paints the lights of a nuclear power plant reflecting on the Hudson River.  She blends a faux-naif style of representation with a loose, bio/geo kind of abstraction for an effect that falls just short of holographic.

Installation of eight paintings, Garnerville Arts Center, Garnerville NY, March 2009