The Thursday Reviews

In the WaPo, Jessica Dawson reviews Mark Dell'Isola at Govinda Gallery in Georgetown, and also reviews Prof. Peter Charles at Irvine Contemporary and has a little blurb on American Icons at Robert Brown.

At G.P., Kriston has an excellent review of Molly Springfield at JET Artworks.

In the City Paper, Louis Jacobson reviews Valeska Soares at Fusebox, while Jeffry Cudlin reviews Shimon Attie at Numark.

The CP also has a letter from J.W. Bailey coming to the defense of curator Annette Polan in the wake of the hubris caused by the "Faces of the Fallen" exhibition.

And finally, the CP has a great feature on painter Erik Sandberg. By the way, since the article doesn't mention it, Erik Sandberg is represented locally by Conner Contemporary Art, which has done a huge amount of work to promote his career and continues to do a superb job in giving Sandberg's name the recognition that it deserves; Erik is lucky to have such a hard working gallery representing his work.

These artist features, which the CP does rather regularly, is one of the key things that makes this paper such a great asset to our cultural tapestry, since none of the other area newspapers does anything remotely similar (unless it is a late obituary).

For the record, I think and have thought for many years, that Sandberg is without a doubt one of the best painters in our area, and I own two of his paintings.

Also for the record, his statement that he left our gallery because "They lost my damn number five times, or they never had my number," differs from my own recollections as to the reasons that he gave us (in a voice mail) for leaving the gallery, one of which was that "he had decided to be on his own and not be represented exclusively by any gallery." This was a couple of days after his very successful first solo show had closed. To this date, he remains the only artist who has ever "left us" voluntarily since we opened our first gallery in 1996.

We gave a very young Erik Sandberg his first solo show in Washington, sold nearly all of his work, and whatever didn't sell was then sold through Sothebys, to collectors in Europe and Japan. Nonetheless, for a variety of reasons, Erik chose to leave our gallery.

I remain a huge fan of Erik Sandberg's work.