by Alex Wells
Glawr, a summer group show of small (a direct effect of a down art market) paintings and sculpture at Hanna Hoffman comes with a five-paragraph explanation of a passage from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando where she explains that ‘Glawr’—‘is the spur of noble minds.’ The 5 paragraph explanation boils this idea down to the avoidance of “being precious or merely decorous” and of each piece being made up of “little components.”
The idea would be both novel and intriguing if it wasn’t muddied behind so much prose, but that is for another article.
Mud and muddiness is indeed the order of the day:
Janice Nowinski Bathers, after Cezanne (2025), an oil-on-board painting showing three bathers, two in a stream and one laying on a grassy shore, faces and details indistinguishable except for a pair of tighty whiteys—painted in what looks like loose, quick wet-on-wet brushwork that results in the entire painting looking like mud.
Ellen Siebers, Birdsong Rapid (2025), an oil painting of a lounging female, one arm draped over her head, eyes gazing directly at the viewer—both a traditional pose and idea—presented in a contemporary hazy brown.
The sculptures do offer, bits and ‘little components’ that make up a whole as in Yuri Masnyj’s, Crucible: Screen, Clarity, Chambers, Opacity, (2024), a small sculpture that looks like the inside of a white minimalist decaying doll house made of small bits of wood, concrete, steel, foam, and paint. It sounds interesting when I write about it, but is in effect, rather boring in that it offers no surprises or point of view. However, it is both the most interesting work in the show and the most successful attempt at reaching Virginia Woolf’s ‘Glawr’ which says something.
The show is not bad if you like small sculptures made of little bits and paintings that look like pseudo-impressionist community-center-class works in a variety of traditional subject matters. But, on opening night the show has a room full of standing-only LA art world elite in attendance extolling the virtues of the paintings on display. “Don’t you just love this one?” they ask me.
And all I can do is smile and nod while I think to myself—So what does ‘Glawr’ look like in Hannah Hoffman’s curatorial brain? Mud. It looks like mud—and camel coats.
Image: Staff