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June Kelly Gallery will present a memorial
exhibition for the painter Sandra Lerner, who passed away in
November 2025, opening Friday, February 6, 2026. Sandra Lerner
was one of the earliest artists to be shown by June Kelly Gallery,
beginning in a group show in 1988, with nine subsequent solo
exhibitions, the last one held in 2023. Her large-scale
paintings have, additionally, been used as backdrops and drop
cloth-like floor surfaces for New-York-based Japanese dance
performance pioneers Eiko and Koma, including at an event held at
the June Kelly Gallery. In 1991, the dancers’ work, LAND,
which premiered in the 1991 Next Wave festival at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, employed sets designed and painted by Lerner.
Lerner’s spare, slow-to-unfold paintings of the time meshed with the
earthy, almost glacial movements of the performers.
In her paintings, Lerner’s early grounding was
in Abstract Expressionism, soon informed by Japanese calligraphy,
which she studied with master calligraphers in Japan; an interest
and practice of Taoism; and – taking form later in her career – a
fascination with astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and outer space.
The lessons of calligraphy – though not practiced in a traditionally
Japanese way - made possible a controlled letting-go as well as a
spareness that furthered the permissions of Abstract Expressionism.
In 1999, critic Cynthia Nadelman wrote: “She
[Lerner] calls her show ‘Empty and Full,’ and that dichotomy is
really what the works embody. They are full of knowledgeable
painting strategies, yet also refreshingly ‘empty,’ able to breathe.
They are full of color, yet almost neutral, pale or scrim-like in
effect. They are replete with useful and interesting
contradictions.”
Nadelman continues, “Her work has for some
time exemplified what we might now call ‘post-regionalism,’ as
mixing and borrowing of cultures takes place the world over.
It is a breath of air.”
Esteemed art critic Donald Kuspit, who wrote
frequently about Lerner’s work, in 2015 put her in the category of
“lyric expressionism,” as opposed to “epic abstraction,” placing her
work alongside artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski,
and Mark Tobey, rather than in the Pollock, deKooning, and Kline
camp.
In late 2019, Lerner’s show at June Kelly
titled “Cosmic Sublime” introduced a vigorous, exciting new
direction for the artist. Suddenly, activity in outer space
lit up her paintings. Black holes or cosmic “wormholes” were
seen glowing in dense outer space. Every inch of these
paintings was covered, with seeming pin pricks of light evoking
active night skies, and there seemed to be palpable movement of
giant forces in space. Some were white-hot – or was it cold? –
others glowing orange, and cosmic rays connected many of the forms.
Of this series, Kuspit wrote: “I suggest that Lerner is a mystic in
scientific disguise, or is it a scientist in mystic disguise: her
cosmic paintings are scientific and mystical at once. They
suggest that scientific knowledge of the cosmos can lead to a
mystical experience of it . . . .” Kuspit goes on to say: “Quantum
entanglement is cosmic dialectic: the interacting, interrelated,
intertwined globular cosmoses, each with a dazzling white core
surrounded by a pulsing yellow ring, in Lerner’s Microcosm series
exemplify it. . . . .Quantum entanglement theory and the wormhole
are about cosmic relationships. I think they are a metaphor
for human relationships for Lerner. . . . In the last analysis
Lerner’s paintings are about the cosmic import of human
relationships.”
Lerner herself probably said it best in the
foreword to her final lifetime exhibition, titled simply
“Entanglement”: “My paintings strive to heighten our awareness of
our oneness with the universe.”
The Sandra Lerner exhibition will be on
display at June Kelly Gallery until March 31.
Cynthia Nadelman
Poet, Art writer, Journalist
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