5 Art Gallery Shows and Museum Exhibits to See in Portland This Spring
Image Kissing & Fucking by Peter Gallo from Gods, Sluts & Martyrs at Adams and Ollman.
As the flowers begin to come up outside, the pictures inside Portland’s galleries and museums won’t be quite so cheery. Well, there is a pastel-hued dream of a Monet exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, as well as a charming, earth-toned California cruiser of geometric abstract paintings coming to town. But elsewhere, pictures of perseverance through heavy darkness are hitting the walls, depicting the ways the Holocaust ripples through generations of artists, how Hollywood propaganda dehumanizes, and no doubt how the present moment of political and historical erasure does the same. Several of the city’s gallerists and curators are turning our attention to the recent past to comment on the present—and there’s a lily pad at the museum if you need to decamp for a respite.
Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana
Thru May 25 | Oregon Jewish Museum
Spanning three generations of the Hungarian Jewish Cahana family, Survival and Intimations of Immortality traces the ways generational trauma manifests in artworks. Abstract painter Alice Lok Cahana was a Holocaust survivor who, after settling in Houston in 1959, made work about her experiences in a concentration camp inspired by midcentury color field painters. Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, her son, is a poet whose work looks both into past familial trauma and into the future. His daughter, Kitra Cahana, is documentary filmmaker and photographer with a focus on social justice who publishes with National Geographic and the New York Times. Produced with the Fritz Ascher Society, this devastating and beautiful show fills the Jewish Museum’s two main galleries with all three artists’ work.
Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny
Mar 1–Aug 10 | Portland Art Museum
The Portland Art Museum has been in a Monet mood lately, featuring the Frenchman’s works in several shows while restoring a Water Lilies painting from its permanent collection. To unveil the freshly unvarnished canvas (now a pastel matte instead of luridly glossed), this show collects “floating world” Japanese prints that inspired Impressionists to eschew grounding reference points and horizon lines in their works. Alongside Monet’s new old canvas, a handful of similarly inspired works by contemporaries including Henri Rivière, Édouard Vuillard, and Jules Chéret will help trace the “floating world” influence in European painting.
Cambodia Reamker #20 by Dinh Q. Lê from the artist’s posthumous retrospective at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.
Dinh Q. Lê
Mar 5–Apr 26 | Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Lê, who died last spring, was a massively influential Vietnamese American artist. He juxtaposed photography and documentary video of the Vietnam War with Hollywood depictions, reconciling fact against fiction, famously weaving the two narratives together in a series of intricate, textile-like collages. This retrospective spotlights Elizabeth Leach Gallery’s nearly three decades showing Lê’s work. “As an artist, Mr. Lê was essentially a historian,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote wrote in an obituary, “one of a critical and corrective bent.”
Dennis Foster
Feb 15–Mar 29 | Nationale
Titled Same Thing Twice, Foster’s latest show at Nationale gives a playful nod to the repetitive color blocks in his paintings. There is an extreme precision at play; his forms are less geometric than they are cubes and rectangles of color. He breaks the severe tone with folksy, organic presentations: a painting on paper, held down on its corners by various small rocks, that’s been creased like a poster pulled from a magazine. But Foster, a one-time Portlander now living in LA, isn’t merely repeating himself. The iterative compositions look for progress in their retellings, as the press release notes, like “the familiar and tranquil act of driving the same route twice from memory.”
Peter Gallo
Apr 11–May 10 | Adams and Ollman
Everything is on the table in Gallo’s smearily assembled paintings. Before seeing Gods, Sluts & Martyrs, the Vermont-based artist’s first West Coast show, you’ll gather he’s not afraid to provoke. Acerbic in style (unkempt), materials (oil paint, news clippings, animal bones), and content (a soup of Catholicism to pop songs), his works are, the gallery writes, “non-verbal,” despite the way paintings such as Kissing & Fucking announce themselves. And there is something to that idea—throwing a flustered and near-illegible storm of everything the culture throws at you back at it. “[T]he rawness is a genuine part of his aesthetic,” as one Brooklyn Rail reviewer put it, “whose ungainliness keeps us thinking.”
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