April 21 – June 3, 2006 at Crecloo Art Gallery, New York, NY
by Robert C. Morgan
Angiola Churchill, an Italian-born American artist, was for many years the chair of the Department of Art and Arts Professions at New York University and the founding director of the NYU summer graduate program of fine art in Venice. Upon her recent retirement, this amazingly profound and prolific octogenarian artist decided to devote all her time to making art as if to make up for the time she had spent as a devoted teacher and administrator. Professor Churchill works with large-scale, poetic cut-paper installations and with biomorphic contours and spatial volumes on overlaying sheets of vellum that suggest feminine sexuality derived from the natural world of flora and fauna.
This most recent series of works echoes the basic themes on which she has worked over the past six decades. I would characterize the symbolic content of her visual themes in the following way: the cycles or life and death in all living creatures, the belief in the superiority of abstract art to communicate basic feelings, the feminine structure of mind and body, the fundamental connection between nature and the human spirit, the belief in fantasy as a primary source for the creative imagination, and the desire of women to live in a civilized, humane world with freedom, dignity, and equality.
In formal terms, her drawings reveal complex (though intuitive) curvilinear shapes overlaid on vellum atop one another or placed in a side-by-side relationship suggesting a gravitational pull between them. Here Churchill continues her exploration of abstract forms and shapes that, for her, carry a strong correlation with those found in the cosmic and micro-worlds. As a critical observer, I see these forms as sharing something in common with the transcendentalists. These American 19th century philosophers believed that what was essential to humankind was in direct relation to the laws of nature. The problem – as shown in the writings of Emerson,Thoreau, and Whitman-- arises when we lose contact and are no longer capable of taking the time to observe or to enjoy nature.
While such ideas were written a century and a half ago (and have their basis in the writings of the early Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu), the problem of nature’s absence in everyday life appears more intensified in recent decades. Since the advent of new technologies, one may only speculate as to how our direction as a species has changed in terms of what we believe is significant and what defines the quality of life. Mature artists like Angiola Churchill are inspired to pursue a voyage that goes deeper into human reality than much of what emerging artists are willing to explore today. Her forms are mostly round and floral, but occasionally angular.They are full of spatial volume and sexual puns that reverberate through the picture plane. Her zest for inciting these forms and for bringing classical contours to life on the picture plane is enormous. Churchill’s ability to sustain intuition as a continuum of creative consciousness is exorbitant, yet without pretension. There are few artists of either gender or of any cultural origin that can make works like these appear so easy and ultimately so convincing.