SUMMER EXHIBITION 2025

SUMMER EXHIBITION, 2025, Morrison Gallery, Kent, Connecticut, through 21 September 2025.  

Found among the works on view this summer in the airy, spacious light-filled Morrison Gallery are some fine examples of classic, mainly abstract works by late avant-gardists like Ronald Bladen, Alexander Liberman and Kenneth Snelson. The highlights of the exhibition, however, are works by contemporary artists such as Alice Aycock, whose towering, spiraling aluminum sculpture Cyclone (2017), activates the gallery space with its countless layers of curvilinear strips of metal that seem to contract and expand with each look. The work indeed evokes the centrifugal force of a cyclone, and all of the alarming ecological implications those random and unpredictable weather events signify these days.

Formally, Aycock’s work corresponds potently with Philip Taaffe’s elegant, mural-scale composition Spiral Painting I (2014) hung on the opposite side of the gallery. Here, Taaffe’s layered patterns of colorful, translucent spirals are well behaved and hypnotic. Though unmistakably contemporary, they conjure the motif’s rarified and venerable origins in antiquity. Contrasting with the flat, austere surface of Taaffe’s work, Joel Longenecker’s trio of large-scale abstract oil compositions of rich impasto hung on an adjacent wall, appear almost like relief sculptures. Inspired by nature, but not beholding to its conventional visual manifestation, Longenecker offers by means of a unique visual language an exploration of and a meditation on the natural environment in terms of radiant color, and the pure sensuality of the densely layered surfaces.  

—David Ebony