October 31, 2003
Hayley Tompkins at Andrew Kreps
An Artforum.com review of Hayley Tompkins' second solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps. I'll include the text here because the link will die two months from now:
Hayley Tompkins's watercolors, executed on board or paper or applied directly to the wall, skirt the boundary between "precious" as a term of criticism and as a term of praise. Most of the works in this exhibition fall on the right side of the line. The best of these tiny paintings—many on square-format boards, a new surface for her—are gems and use minimal means to maximum effect. Their visual logic seems intuited, casual without being tossed off. One, approximately six inches square, uses three vertical lines with hooked ends to signify intersecting walls; another's black dashes look like a vertically bisected fireworks explosion. Tompkins cites Malevich, Sonia Delaunay, and Oskar Schlemmer as influences, but for now she seems more adept at Schlemmer's use of line than the others' blocks of color. The quiet elegance of Richard Tuttle and Robert Barry (whose work is on view at Gasser & Grunert through November 8) also comes to mind.