Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition with artist David Row. The works on view highlight the artist’s recent series of shaped canvasses and related works on paper.
Row paints in heavily worked layers of lush oil paint, gradually forming a dense network of marks and lines. Broad swaths of color highlight and disguise underlying grounds, themselves crisscrossed by the artist’s familiar elliptical bands. In his essay Return to Orbit Raphael Rubinstein explains:
The appearance of the painting is the result of how it has been made; the irregularities of surface and shape occur and are left as they occur. Row accepts but does not make too much of them because he is focused on something more important, on the totality of the painting.

In the artist’s most recent work, the drama of his geometric compositions plays out across a new format. Irregular polygonal shaped canvasses assert themselves as jewel like objects, defining the conversation unfolding within their borders. Meanwhile, Row’s curvilinear forms and signature diptychs continue to behave according to their own secret logic, carving architectural paths through space.