Norman Bluhm at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City: Art Exhibition Review

The late artist Norman Bluhm’s enthralling, sweeping paintings included in a new exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City make space — the physical manifestation of it and the sensory experience of it, as it moves and shifts — into an enveloping and enrapturing journey. The external, that which sits outside of us and surrounds us, physically defining our environments: here, it’s activated, elevated, and moving.

Bluhm’s exhibited artworks concurrently envision movement with bulk, power, import, and altering impact: a metaphorical landing routine that creates flux in its results and keeps the moving and shifting itself in consistent change. It’s something you sense at every point on these canvases, where I could really never find a perceptible beginning or end, an aesthetic resolution bringing the splashes of color to a close.

Instead, I felt heaving potential — the want, the desire to be in the next space, embodied within existing in a first one — at every individual point on these artworks. The next was mirrored, reflected: an image of it, felt.

The paintings unfurl jubilee drawn from the intermingling of merely adjacent points and beings within inhabited spaces, with each moment of interaction spurring spiraling waves of gnawing energy, plus a certain homeliness and assurance. The paintings run on cohesion drawn not strictly from formal interaction or something obvious, but a relational togetherness.

The many forms that do appear across Bluhm’s surfaces feel drawn from the same place, the same origin: the same experiential substrate. You feel a burst of recognition. They’re remnants, approximations, shadows, or more realistic manifestations of real movement and the kind of sweeping, personal touch that can course through its veins.

Bluhm’s abstractions use large swathes of vibrant color, including some hues that remind me of physical, human touch — expanded to the scale of an environment. The paintings blend curvatures with fields of color as the pigments hurl themselves against the canvases in perpetuity, originally set in motion by Bluhm in these paintings in the 1960s and 1970s.

The sweeps of color are inviting, magisterial, architectural, encircling, and in steady, swinging flux. It’s place, as a body, and place reflecting on the bodily experience of it: an interchange of the singular and the grand, expansion of a movement, a step, into the defining contour of its surrounding space as a whole. Movement, forward progression, walking, swinging your gaze across the large artworks: it all becomes something defining, something emphatic, something grounding the longing rhythms of these shapes of color.

The rounded, swinging, imprecise but forceful pushes of motion across these canvases feel reflective of how people move, how living things move, how they leave themselves and their movements and their inclinations and ambitions — even the quiet, vulnerable, and personal — as the signature of a place, the artifact of it, the reminder that someone was here, someone was feeling something: hopeful.

I know this place in the art, and I think it knows me. It cares about me. It’s the reverberation of the love and care set out before me, ringing out beyond progression but existing together. These places encircle and offer a wash of light freely permeating these expanded, space-defining movements, and I hear what they all offer. As much as there’s not really a sense of physically defined or tangible space in these paintings, there is abundant, overflowing light.

I remember light around a corner, light dimmed to accommodate the night as I was nonetheless left moving through the halls, halls I don’t even know to still exist physically and that I think merge into other halls in my memory. There is nothing I can see, feel, or remember at the end of the halls. But Bluhm’s created spaces expand and return personal, careful movement.

The exhibited paintings feature ample, flowing white that lifts the profile of everything I’m looking at in my memory as I type this on my phone while walking through a strangely lit public transit building.

I remember playing with a type of light switch I’d never seen before, I remember wondering if I would ever see it again, and I remember remembering.

I can hear these spaces… the lighting’s hum. I was here before, and I’m still here now.

Bluhm’s exhibition continues through March 15 at Miles McEnery Gallery.

Featured image: “Norman Bluhm” (installation view) at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York City, January 30 – March 15, 2025. Image courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.