Red Arrow’s annual Nashville Hot Summer exhibition is a warm-weather-themed affair that routinely plays fast and loose with the expectations of commercial gallery summer art shows, which traditionally offer saleable artists in big group displays. It’s a strategy that encourages visitors even in the thickest humidity — and it also appeals to tourists. Red Arrow is one of the most dynamic and consequential galleries in the city, and this fourth iteration of Nashville Hot Summer is an idiosyncratic assembly of the gallery artists’ disparate approaches to painting, printing and photography.
This version of Nashville Hot Summer isn’t strictly a show of abstract art, but every work in the exhibition features some degree of abstraction or stylizing. Many of the 2D pieces on display demonstrate the Next New Formalism that I’ve been covering as an emerging movement in the New York art market and increasingly on display in Nashville.
Red Arrow is taking Knoxville native Brianna Bass for a solo exhibition in their booth at The Armory Show to celebrate the beginning of New York’s fall art season, Sept. 24 through 27. Bass recently received her MFA from Yale and still lives in Connecticut. Her abstract paintings are meticulously laid out in undulating grids of shades and hues that correspond to color theory formulae. Despite the pieces’ painstaking preparations, Bass applies her colors with just enough painterly gusto to make them gooey and sexy instead of strict and precise. Add in the trippy op-art effects her wildest compositions can induce and Bass is one of the gallery’s standout artists. “Lumiphage,” hanging in Nashville Hot Summer, is emblematic of the artist’s best work. Bass’ pixel-like colored cells form a vertical wave of squirming oil paint on canvas. The snaky squiggle looks like it’s glowing purple, pink and green. It’s committed formalist work that’s delightfully free of narratives, interrogations and propaganda, and it’s why I think Bass will make a big splash in the Big Apple.
“Lumiphage,” Brianna Bass
Linda King Ferguson’s “Equivalence: Hot Summer” combines distemper and acrylic on canvas. It’s a small abstract painting with a composition that resembles a bowl-like form defined by colored rectangles. The surface is dominated by a pinkish orange that recalls the orange sherbet from an ice cream truck Push-Up treat. The colorful shapes reflect the vibrant palettes of summer — from flower gardens to pool toys to bikinis and baseball uniforms. It’s another strong formalist work that conveys the warmth of the season and its colorful delights with only hues and textures. When you look at this painting, you smell coconut lotion and your hair gets frizzy.
“No Ordinary Sunset,” Vesna Pavlović
‘Aftershadow’ at Red Arrow is the New York-based artist’s first solo show in Nashville
Vesna Pavlović’s photograph of a sunset on a beach, “No Ordinary Sunset,” delivers on its title with the artist printing the image on white birch board. It’s a gorgeous, unexpected presentation that puts the amusingly on-the-nose summertime subject in a sophisticated formalist conversation with a show that’s mostly full of paintings. The artist’s “Signal Maritime Flag” is a triangular satin banner printed with an illustration by Serbian artist Monika Lang. It depicts a sequence of three geometric abstract renderings of a sun setting over a blue ocean. It looks like it fell off someone’s sailboat, or maybe it was a part of a weird kite with a long streamer that hangs from the triangular banner like a colorful tail. Together these pieces put viewers in mind of both beaches and boats, but their sunset themes remind viewers that we’re now closer to the beginning of college football season than the Fourth of July.
What makes a big group show like this so fun are the wild combinations of arrangements and juxtapositions that naturally canoodle and collide. Additionalworks from Annie Brito Hodgin, Brady Haston, Dax van Aalten, Jennifer Pepper, John Paul Kesling, Julian Rogers, Karen Seapker, Kelly Williams, LeXander Bryant and Sam Angel make Nashville Hot Summer a must-see summer event.
