An elongated head at the entrance to Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s ‘Surreal America’, painted c. 1947 by Russian-born painter and set-designer Pavel Tchelitchew substitutes a face for a cluster of glowing, interconnected lines recalling a synaptic network. Both picturing a real head – see the halo of fine hairs – and an abstracted representation of thought processes, the piece introduces the mix of styles that US-based artists employed as they adapted European Surrealism to their own ends. Virginia Berresford’s 1940 ‘Air Raid I’ strikingly pits a sole person’s hand against military aircraft overhead, finding surreality in an advancing existential threat. Paintings by Jackson Pollock, Hans Hoffman, and Adolf Gottlieb employ color and archetypal forms to plumb the depths of human experience while Betye Saar, Joseph Cornell, and Lee Bontecou construct their own mini-architectures with which to contain the world. (On view through Nov 8th in Chelsea).
