Weathered Surfaces, Angela China Opens Moods of Nature at Half Gallery

On East Fourth Street in the East Village, a small gallery has hung paintings that took years to finish because the artist would not let them go.

Half Gallery opened *Moods of Nature*, a show of new abstract paintings by Angela China, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, October 14. The show stays up through November 11 at 235 East 4th Street.

The gallery's essay for the show starts somewhere unexpected. In May, it notes, the artist Josh Kline gave a talk at St. Mark's Church off Second Avenue about how disposable images have become. His argument, as the gallery tells it, was that a daily flood of pictures has worn down our ability to remember them, while physical objects still leave a mark. China's paintings, the essay says, answer that problem quietly.

Paint as a Record

The gallery describes her method as an almost archaeological build-up. Each canvas is worked in layers over long stretches, and the surface becomes a kind of map of what happened to it. The essay says the work hovers between landscape and landslide, between deep space and the blunt fact of thick oil paint seen up close.

It also borrows a term usually kept for other media. Décollage, the practice of tearing or stripping layers away, is linked in the essay with the photographs of Aaron Siskind and the work of Mark Bradford. China gets a similar effect with one medium, the gallery says, without collage and without depicting anything directly.

China describes it in her own words in the gallery's text. She says she scrapes back layers to expose what came before and trusts that meaning will show itself over time. "I am drawn to an aesthetic of erosion and survival," she says, to surfaces that look weathered by what they have been through.

I am drawn to an aesthetic of erosion and survival.

The title gets its own reading in the essay. Nature, it argues, is not a closed loop but a spiral that keeps coming back to familiar forms in new variations. Nature hates a straight line, the gallery writes. One painting it singles out is *Pink Sky*, which it says suggests plants and animals while its title questions the idea that anything stays fixed.

From Gumshoe to the Gallery Wall

The more surprising part of the story is where China started. The gallery says she came up as a graffiti artist and worked under the tag Gumshoe. The image was a pair of women's legs, one foot trailing a wad of bubblegum. The essay points out that the name is also old slang for a private detective, and asks what she is investigating now.

Her answer, in the release, is about stubbornness. "I began as a figurative painter, depicting the female form," she says. She came to abstraction, she explains, because she refused to throw away a canvas, and worked through hundreds of failed paintings until they turned into something else. Each surface, in her telling, becomes an archive of missteps, revisions and endurance.

She names her company plainly. Titian and Goya, the Impressionists, and modern and contemporary painters including Francis Bacon, Joan Mitchell and Cecily Brown. "My work is in constant conversation with them," she says, while insisting that the paintings still speak in her own voice.

A Small Room With a Long List

Besides the East Fourth Street room, Half Gallery runs an Annex and a Los Angeles space, and its past exhibitions include Louise Bonnet, Duncan Hannah, Rene Ricard and Umar Rashid, according to the gallery's own list. Erin Goldberger is its director.

Style & Tactics, whose October art guide lists the opening, gives the title as *Mood of Nature*. The gallery's own site says *Moods of Nature*, and that is the title used here.

What to Know Before You Go

*Moods of Nature* runs through November 11 at Half Gallery, 235 East 4th Street. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. The phone number is 212-420-5912.

Make an evening of the neighborhood. The New Museum is nearby on the Bowery, where Arthur Jafa's survey fills the building. See our story on I Am Tony.

A painter spent years on canvases she would not give up on. On East Fourth Street, they finally hang still.

*The photograph at the top of this story is an abstract paint texture by Klara Kulikova, not a work by Angela China.*