Over the years, Susan Walp has finely honed her signature motif: a small, square still life, centered by a luminously rendered vessel or fruit that, icon-like, entices the viewer into its depths. Her renderings are delicate but incisive, with choice notes of color defining her central objects, and outer forms slipping into an atmospheric surround. Her latest show at Tibor de Nagy shows some intriguing variants of style: the more abstracted “Blood Orange Cut Open with Knife and Cork” (2012) reminds one of Gerald Murphy’s elegantly Cubistic still lifes, while “Pummelo with Knife and Black Scrunchgie” (2011), with its spry, looping contours, recalls the graphic exuberance of the late Will Barnet.

But the paintings here firmly retain Ms. Walp’s own temperament, none more so than the exquisite “Crabapples in a Bowl with Scrunchie” (2011), in which numerous, subtle feints of red—richer, darker, warmer—move over the surfaces of the apples, turning them into lusciously weighty nuggets, drawing one ever deeper into the bowl’s glistening depths.

Tibor de Nagy Gallery
724 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10019
212-262-5050 · www.tibordenagy.com                                         back