David Nadel: Burns II @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 14 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the elongated single room gallery space. All of the works are archival pigment prints. The images come in two sizes: 16x20, in editions of 8, and 40x50, in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: David Nadel's second installment of wildfire charred, snow covered Montana landscapes introduces a series of small refinements to his already successful visual formula. Like the works from his previous show (in 2011), his newest images begin with arduous hikes to remote areas of unpeopled wilderness and end with miles of forested space compressed into flattened planes of nearly abstract lines. What's different this time is a subtle sense of increased sharpness, where the soft haziness of the early works has been traded in for a slightly tighter and crisper aesthetic.

Nadel's trees run the gamut from thin and spindly to dense and furry, depending on his distance from them and their natural clustering. Long views turn the trees into hairy bands and layers of medium grey that settle into the mounded hollows and angled valleys of the mountainous terrain. Closer in compositions are made of striking, all-over verticals, the trees striped into high contrast minimalist lines or feathered like bottle brushes. Against the blank whiteness of the snow, the endless repetition of the textural trees becomes meditative, the enveloping monochrome environment broken only by the isolated splashes of color of a lone, defiant regrown evergreen or the thin red stems of dormant undergrowth.

The best of Nadel's new landscapes have an almost mathematical rigor and precision, where the trees are dead-on straight and the lines run up like zips, creating a humming screen of verticals. It's these back and forth battles between organic and abstract that are fresh and exciting here, giving the works an added layer of formal interest beyond their obvious natural grandeur.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced as follows: the 16x20 prints are $1500 each and the 40x50 prints are $4000 each, a small increase from his last show. Nadel's work has not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)

David Nadel: Burns II
Through March 10th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
70 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

David Nadel, Burns @Wolf

JTF (just the facts): A total of 11 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the prints are archival pigment prints. The images come in two sizes: 15x12 in editions of 8, and 35x44 in editions of 6. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: David Nadel's photographs of snow bound Montana forests reduce the landscape to a set of minimalist gestures, where charred tree trunks become dark vertical lines against the vast expanse of white. His pictures are like abstract exercises in linear geometry, executed with the delicacy of a dry point etching.

My first reaction when I entered the gallery was that these pictures were the direct descendants of Frank Gohlke's Mount St. Helens images from the early 1980s, and they certainly share a common aesthetic of fallen trees and dense textural surfaces. What's different here is that Nadel's pictures are even flatter; significant depths of distance have been aligned into one skyless plane, removing the sense of scale and abstracting the mountains and valleys into white backdrops. As such, there is also some intellectual kinship to Frederick Sommer's desert works, or some of Taiji Matsue's elevated landscapes. Depending on Nadel's position, the blackened trunks can look like up-close shoots of bamboo, or can be transformed into a calligraphic mix of spindly lines when seen from afar. The contrasts of thick and thin become the elements of his monochrome compositions.

At one level, there is something simple and decorative about this work; the effects of powerful burning have been softened, turned into muted line drawings. What I like better is to consider the concept of using the land as a basis for radical abstraction, and to see how different photographers have stripped away context in landscape to highlight its nuances of pattern and form.

Collector's POV: The works on view are priced as follows: the 15x12 prints are $1200 each and the 35x44 prints are $3000 each. Nadel's work has not yet entered the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in the show is Burn #2; it's on the right in the in the middle installation shot. I liked the busy right angle intersection of perpendicular lines formed by the vertical trunks and the fallen logs.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: Wall Street Journal (here, scroll down)

David Nadel, Burns

Through March 26th

Sasha Wolf Gallery
528 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001