1½ col to float

Loren MacIver, “Fleurs de Marronniers,” 1963, oil on canvas, 64 by 51¼ inches, photo courtesy Alexandre Gallery, New York.

sent e-m 1-23 ellen

MUST 2-1

LOREN MACIVER’S “POETRY OF OBJECTS’ AT ALEXANDRE GALLERY w/1/cut

avv/lsb set 1/23 #726657

NEW YORK CITY — “Loren MacIver: The Poetry of Objects” is on view through February 29 at Alexandre Gallery, a survey exhibition of paintings and drawings dating from 1935 through the early 1980s, spanning the artist’s career. The show includes 16 paintings and a selection of works on paper.

The title refers to MacIver’s frequent depiction of objects from her quotidian surroundings, both in New York and in France. From Elizabeth Bishop’s rosary to Etruscan vases at the Metropolitan or objects on a fire escape, these works describe ephemera and bibelots of daily life.

The intensity of MacIver’s focus on sensuous fleeting objects keeps them in the world. Her interest is in the tenuous, transparent and the easily overlooked. Often the objects take on a form of hieroglyph, as in “Patisserie,” where rows of abstracted pastries become symbolic. Her use of pale washes of color, delicate line, all-over composition and semiabstraction work toward her goal “to make something permanent out of the transitory.”

Poets were an integral part of MacIver’s social milieu. She was married to Lloyd Frankenberg and was lifelong friends with Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas. Her paintings have few direct corollaries to their work, though a record exists through correspondence.

Highlights of MacIver’s biography include the 1946 landmark exhibition “Fourteen Americans” organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney Museum presented a retrospective of her work in 1953. In 1962 her work represented the United States at the 31st Venice Biennale. Her work is included in major public collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection and Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Alexandre Gallery is in the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street. For information, www.alexandregallery.com or 212-755-2828.