Eleanore Mikus at the Drawing Center

Eleanore Mikus's geometric canvases looked like "some of the blankest abstractions in town," wrote a reviewer of her first New York solo exhibition in 1960. A visitor to her recent retrospective at the Drawing Center, which included work from the '60s to the present, would hardly disagree. In an approach that is related to some of Robert Ryman's work, Mikus is committed to a career-long exploration of the subtleties found in the limited space between painting and relief. The bulk of the show, titled "From Shell to Skin," consisted of works on paper, mostly small sheets, rarely larger than this magazine page, folded in a gridlike pattern. The qualities of the paper, its density, weave and surface, reward a slowly roving eye. The sheets are usually white, but can be red and black. They are often unpainted but can be treated to washes of watercolor and acrylic to give a luminous or marbling effect. Mikus's obvious love for paper and the intimate distance of detail fall several heartbeats shy of fetishization of either material or craftsmanship.

In addition to her modest origami, Mikus is an accomplished abstract painter and constructor. The exhibition presented several of her "Tablets," the smooth white enamel-painted wood constructions that resemble porcelain skin over toned abdominals. Tablet 6 (1962), at 47 by 37 inches one of the larger works on view, suggests a Klee buried under a deep, quiet snowfall. The earliest pieces look crisp and clear, leaping from storage into the present with nary a misstep. The only dusty works are a few small Arman-like accumulations of tacks, staples, or stamp hinges embedded in rabbit skin glue. One can see the early impulse at bas-relief collage, and one feels pleased that Mikus soon hit upon her original solution of encasing hard forms in a thick veil of lustrous gesso and enamel.

Sadly, none of the surprisingly colorful, childlike representational paintings she produced in the late '60s and early '70s were included in this exhibition. As the interest in post-Ab-Ex abstraction is expanding to include the likes of Mikus and George Ortman, curators are paring away any formal inconsistency or eccentricity for the sake of a neo-purism.

The contemporary eye often longs for a sense of the human touch in even the starkest of abstractions. The work of Eleanore Mikus, in a variety of mediums, delivers on this yearning for surface qualities, lushness and emotional effect.

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