The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Rifka Milder at The Yard, Carter Burden & La Mama Theater
2023.7.10
I met Rifka Milder
through her father, the painter Jay Milder, but we have developed our
own friendship over the years. Rifka works purely abstractly, though
years ago she painted ponds reflecting trees, and also small panes of
glass from the NY Garden Conservatory. In both situations, the
reflections translated into loose grids of amorphously-shaped fields of
simplified colors often surrounded by globular contours of contrasting
color. Eventually, it seems Rifka discovered
her real love was the rhythm of these shapes and lines, and so her
abstract paintings apparently began from where the pond paintings ended:
with these rhythms of reflected water rings. In her current exhibition
at The Yard, each painting dances with woven shapes and organically
curved lines of reds, greens, oranges, yellows and blues, creating an
energetic life of volume, movement and organic space. Rifka’s
exhibition at The Yard (195 Broadway, 4th floor) in Williamsburg,
remains on view through August 10. The door is open Tues to Saturday
10am - 3:45pm, but you can stay later. Also, through July 26, four of
her colored drawings are hanging at the Carter Burden Gallery, and one
of her paintings is on permanent display in the lobby at the La Mama
Theater