Hueless at the Mallick Williams Gallery, NYC

Black and white is the essence of simplicity, and yet has the ability to be stunning and complicated through this very essence. By removing color, we as an audience are forced to look at the outlines of a work, to impart our own color and narrative onto the work. Many varieties of work such as photography and film, were only in black and white until technological advances were made that allowed color to overtake black and white as the expected voice of the work. However, it is often by seeing a photo in black and white that we are forced to truly look at the lines of a subject’s face, the emotion in their eye. This is not to say that color has no meaning, but that by breaking work back down into the skeletal allows the viewer to see and understand the shades of grey in a new way.


This is the premise of the inaugural exhibition of the Mallick Williams gallery. With a theme of Hueless, they sought to break down art to its very bare bones. Commissioning artists, some of whom naturally work only in black and white, and some of whom were stepping outside of their comfort zone by reducing their work to black and white. The media utilized included paint, ballpoint, neon signs, graphite on paper, bronze and more.

It is an ambitious undertaking, to include so many different eyes and so many different media, but by having an overarching theme of simplicity in color, it works and does not clash. While there are many pieces deserving of mention, one of the standout works is by Skullphone, who I was informed I could not meet because “he wants to remain anonymous.”

I have mixed feelings about the new drive of artists to stay forever anonymous. It is both valiant and wonderful, and allows them to remain observant without their egos getting the best of their work, and yet frustrating to an extent as a writer and viewer. Part of artwork is understanding and seeing from the artist’s point of view. To have no ability to evaluate them as a person as well however does force the view back to the work itself.

A skull with somewhat incomprehensible writing underneath (it says “Here’s your nightmare" (crossed out). "Here the nightmare you created."), it reminded me from far away of the childhood game Lite Brite. However, up close one sees the pixels are actually painstakingly painted onto the background, which blew me away. His work, according to gallery director Jeremy Kaplan, “has always been routed in our relationship with technology and our surroundings, man vs. machine in a way.” What looks like such a simple piece from far away is actually quite intense and devoted to challenging one’s eye.



Full disclosure: I was invited to this event by my friend Faust, who is one of the artists shown in the opening. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention him, as I've long been a fan of his eye. His work that stunned me so long ago was a simple building painting, created in a way that echoes that same eerie Edward Hopper quality of loneliness and emptiness in the steel-encased and boxed in world of a city. By completely omitting the populace in his art, the dark emotions and loneliness that can come of being bound in by such a man-made enclosure becomes the focus. Usually painting in color, the hollow feeling is enhanced here by the use of greyscale colors. The solidity of lines and lack of sensuality all contribute to a moody and significant piece.



The final piece I want to highlight is that of Dirk Dzimirsky. Creating hyper-realistic photo-style drawings of faces, even up close one is easily misled into believing that this is a photo of a person and not a drawing! The picture of a child’s face, eyes closed, contains such mastery of the medium that one feels the desire to reach out and brush her hair off her shoulder and to gently put her to bed. It is a perfect example of how easily a piece of work can be deceiving in its simplicity. So too is black and white a much more complicated medium than one is led to believe.

All in all, this showing is a comprehensive yet understated gathering of the complicated relationship that comes about when one goes back to basics.



The Mallick Williams Gallery is located at 150 11th Avenue, New York, New York 10011. The Hueless exhibition will run from March 4th-April 13th. More information can be found at http://www.mallickwilliams.com/.