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Elliot Green at Postmasters
  
     
 
Baby arm Reaching
2000
 
Bob Dylan Returning Shirley Temple to Liza Minelli
2000
 
In this riveting show, Elliot Green continued his exploration of a unique form of figuration that blends surrealist illusionism, punning cartoon references and modernist abstraction. His recent paintings are centered on drawing. By way of introduction, a computer screen installed at the gallery entrance featured a hypnotic montage of continuously morphing figures. In the eight new canvases that were on view in the gallery, Green has moved far away from the tableau-like compositions that he first showed in New York almost a decade ago. Although the new work is less abstract than that in his previous Postmasters show, the cartoon-like imagery of improbable figures and animals appears extremely fragmented. Bits of limbs appear here and there. Heads and hands emerge from the edges of the canvases as formal devices in the service of colorful geometric compositions, rather than as the focus of the quasi-surrealist landscapes in earlier works.

Among the many striking canvases here, Baby arm Reaching puns on modernist abstract space. Two Loners out of Character suggests a psychodrama involving a man and his dog. While this picture may be worth a thousand words, Bob Dylan Returning Shirley Temple to Liza Minelli can speak for itself.

Elliot Green, "New Full Color Paintings and Sketch Movies," May 13-June 24, at Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001.

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