REVIEWS

The Boston Globe / Arts & Reviews 
A Face in the Cloud
Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent / November 22, 2007

Ann Strassman: New Work
KIDDER-SMITH GALLERY
Boston

Ann Strassman paints faces we all know, from Dick Cheney to Jack Nicholson to Abraham Lincoln. She does it with athletic, spontaneous gestures in acrylic on flattened cardboard appliance boxes. Her show at Kidder Smith Gallery has a giddy appeal because her iconic subjects work hypnotically upon us viewers. We love seeing faces that we recognize, that have meaning for us. That they're made with such slapdash élan on cardboard throwaways makes them that much more perversely appealing.

You won't see Strassman's portrait of Dick Cheney hanging at the White House, not only because of its lowbrow materials, but because Cheney's lip lifts in a snarl. It's funny, but more political cartoon than painting. Her image of a leonine Fidel Castro is more interesting, more painterly: He leans back and exhales a cloud of cigar smoke, which gathers before him. It looks almost as if Castro has appeared, like a dream, in a puff of his own smoke.

The artist's Theodore Roosevelt looks oddly depressed, as if he's about to dissolve into a wash of drippy paint. She has brushed a sad Lincoln over a ragged fabric collage in red, white, and blue, like bloody bandages. It's no reinvention of Lincoln, or even a reinterpretation, which we'd look for in contemporary art. But it is beautifully executed.

Strassman couples Andy Warhol's fetishization of the famous with an expressionistic exuberance that says yeah, it's all just a dream, a flash of magic that tomorrow will hit the trash can. We might as well enjoy it while we can.

ARTNEWS, June 2003
Ken Shulman

Ann Strassman
KIDDER-SMITH GALLERY
Boston

There is an exquisite irony in visual repetition: the more an image is reproduced, the more its identity tends to fade. In the hands of marketers and mythmakers, portraits of heroic leaders are quickly turned into pale parodies of power; icons of faith erode into vague symbolic shapes that can still influence the masses but cannot inspire or move them. In her best work, Ann Strassman stems this depersonalizing tide. Her sparse, elegantly stroked images of Fidel Castro, George Washington, Che Guevara, Pope John Paul II,and Abraham Lincoln, all on view here, revived the once-hackneyed images of these icons.

Mr. Lincoln (1998) was one of several engaging paintings Strassmanexhibited.With broad, swooping swaths of dark acrylic paint, she created a likeness of America’s 16th president on a flattened refrigerator-shipping carton. Executed over strips of black packing tape that marked the vertical and diagonal axes of the image, the painting looked almost as if it had been stamped or printed by machine. Yet Strassman’s handicraft and the carefully constructed illusion of haste gave the portrait the sincere and singular dignity of a street painting.

American Greetings (1997), another image of Lincoln, this time done in heavy beiges and browns, was a collaged canvas sewn with fraying horizontal stripes, referencing the American flag. The upper-left corner, where one expected to see the blue block of white stars, was empty; the stars had trickled down and lay strewn toward the bottom of the canvas like confetti after a parade. The concert of cowboy colors and playful, geometric abstraction sounded high and low notes in a sort of requiem for the American myth. Strassman also presented a series of dusky depictions of trees, created with dark interwoven brushstrokes that resulted in thick, almost opaque surfaces.