Nancy Becker-Pettibone at Francis M. Naumann - New York

Nancy Becker-Pettibone's meticulous watercolors fall within the generous embrace of appropriation art. The watercolors included in this thoughtfully installed exhibition faithfully, and sometimes magically, draw on a range of modern and old-master paintings as well as decorative objects in the collections of important museums. Adapting her own preferred medium to those of the originals, Becker-Pettibone evinces a fine eye for nuance and detail and a hushed sense of reverence for the works of art that are her models. Presented at the gallery of Duchamp scholar Francis M. Naumann, the exhibition was planned to coincide with a nearby show of the work of Richard Pettibone, a pioneer of the appropriationist genre who is also the artist's husband.

In a series of particular interest, Becker-Pettibone addresses still lifes of the Netherlandish "golden age," paintings that appeal in part because of their verisimilitude and the elegance of their execution. In Vase of Flowers, Jacob van Walscapelle (1644-1727), 1996, 33 by 28 inches (including the frame), Becker-Pettibone carefully re-creates the flowers and insects as rendered by the estimable Dutch artist in the original painting: tulips, carnations, the short-lived morning glory, a scattering of berries. A beetle takes shelter near a fallen carnation, a snail crawls along the edge of the table, a caterpillar dangles from a leaf--various signs of the cycles of life. Drops of water, the source of life, appear on a table that signifies offering, and a window is reflected on the surface of the glass vase.

Close by, Becker-Pettibone installed two additional, smaller watercolors that are details abstracted from the painting: the carnation and beetle in one, a red-and-white striped tulip in the other. In Vase of Flowers, Poppy #1 (detail), Jan Davidsz. De Heem (c. 1645), 1998, she renders the flower of death, one of a number of details from a related still life by the Dutch-Flemish master, without fully essaying the entire painting, adding a second, larger study of the same subject (2002) to the ensemble.

Becker-Pettibone crafts handsome, robust frames that are an integral part of each work. Constructed in cardboard strengthened with wooden dowels, they are finished with glue and acrylic, simulating wood and parchment. A number of her watercolors are push-pinned to the backing of their frames, a means of presentation appropriate to the medium and to the modernity of her process and thought. During the course of her husband's exhibition at Leo Castelli, a framed Becker-Pettibone detail of a tulip appeared at the gallery, and reciprocally, one of Richard Pettibone's "Andy Warhol Marilyns" was included among the Becker-Pettibones, each registering as a footnote in an ongoing discourse.

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