“Gerome Kamrowski: An American Surrealist” at Lincoln Glenn: Art Exhibition Review

The art of the late Gerome Kamrowski, as spotlighted in a recently concluded exhibition at the art gallery Lincoln Glenn in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, asks us to see the exterior world alongside the interior as all inwardly interconnected.

Gerome Kamrowski at Lincoln Glenn

Kamrowski’s featured artworks, hinging on combinations of materials ranging from enamel and oil on canvas to colored pencil on paper, were generally surrealist in nature, blending touchpoints of visual, experienced reality into new visions. The artist himself passed away in 2004, having lived and worked through multiple rounds of major developments shifting the paradigms of modern art.

Unlike, say, other work I have seen by the late artist Yves Tanguy, Kamrowski’s surrealist visions mostly did not feel like a physically three-dimensional place, though this artist still hearkened to those environments.

Kamrowski layered abstract but still evocative shapes that seemed to move on some internally propulsive power, melding curvature with the angular in a manner directly evocative of the sometimes surprising way that the organic world, including our own bodies, hangs together. There are similar forms between perceptibly wildly diverging forms of life and environment, and Kamrowski brings forward this ultimately interconnecting language of form and relationship.

In Kamrowski’s surrealism, the entirety of the environment — perceptibly three-dimensional or not — and what lies within it teem with not just a general, vague concept of life but a focused drive: molecules or the much larger forms they comprise seem to collide, creating from their friction a new, scouring energy that itself begins its own searching journey without any delay. That drive is persistent and obsessive. Life, here — as the momentary but sweeping, is incessant.

In Kamrowski’s art, the minute and momentary seem combined with the grand and gestural. The orderly, cause-and-effect progression of time and associated experience slips away but without a lack of clarity, as in each artwork, the overall visual effect is still powerfully and inwardly resonant.

Here, the layering of feeling atop feeling — whether something more crushing, something more sky-searching, or something simply constructive, in the sense of either mundaneity or even our built environments — establishes a fresh, mutually supportive order. Where some abstract modern art might speak a language of feeling alone, Kamrowski intermingles the subjective with what remain as flashes of something perceptually recognizable, breaking down the magisterially sweeping into a choir of inwardly driven puzzle pieces of existence.

And that wavelength truly feels consumptive, making the thudding passage of time that you might imagine always looming in the background of any experience or memory into something that feels tangibly reflected in each conceptual or surface area in the art. At the same time, contours of individualized, experienced physicality become a unified song jumping across moments, everything combining beautifully.

Architecture and Human Form, Together

Kamrowski’s “Jack in the Box” (1950), in which what looks like a skyline or industrial park is awash in dizzying, overlaid color and form, brings real-world architecture to the fore, while works including “Dream Woman” (1940) and “Pink Figure” from the same year nod to the human form — expanding it dramatically. In “Dream Woman,” a human figure merges into a cacophony of abstraction in its upper half, though the entirety of this apparent individual’s presence remains nonetheless defiantly interconnected, in my reading.

Across Kamrowski’s exhibited work, the internal remains linked with the structural: an energy without clearly established origin, though its presence is very clearly felt. It’s an esoteric, mystical, perception-scaling vision of what you feel in this art is connected to the everyday but remains visually very distinct from it.

It’s a present that’s crowded, even packed to the brim by a feeling of potential, sometimes weighing down the apparent protagonist or scene, though it continues. And in that, you sometimes feel like within the imprint of this burgeoning, constant, and even explosively propulsive energy, there’s some undescribed but felt doom that’s lurking around some corner. In the constancy of the structural drive, you feel a possibility of the individual and the momentary ending up not just subsumed into something greater but crushed and smothered.

The two paths — supportive existence and damaging destruction — feel as though they exist in simultaneity as Kamrowski’s art blends grandeur with an oddly gnawing sense of perceptual erosion. And knowing at least of the ideological context for surrealist art of the 20th Century, I ended up feeling a sense of suggested worry about where it — meaning industrial and technological development — was all going. And that trepidation feels internal to the scenery and figures that you are seeing in this art. It’s a felt facet to the experience amid the occasional lack of direct, obvious, situationally progressive connection between some varying forms.

Everything here — form, figure, and background alike — seems like it’s yearning for resolution and connection, whether on an organic or situational and relational level.

In the meantime, the awesome, biological, and environmental power that we know fuels our personal and collective existences on this earth continues: a personal persistence against a cloud of uncertainty. There’s room for hope, optimism, and the yearning to continue. Everything is alive, and together: the structural sweep of our built environments animated from within by our desires and goals. It’s a story told through layers of inward drive rather than the fine-tuned and rigid — the biggest, brightest, and boldest within reach at a potential cost of its searing heat.

“Gerome Kamrowski: An American Surrealist” was held, as mentioned, at the gallery Lincoln Glenn’s present space in Chelsea, New York.

Featured image: “Gerome Kamrowski: An American Surrealist” (installation view), Lincoln Glenn, New York, September 28 – November 16, 2024. Image provided by Lincoln Glenn.