Galleries: Paintings that revisit the horrors of Hiroshima

During a visit to Hiroshima last year, the New York-based printmaker and painter Hitoshi Nakazato was commissioned by a gallery there to create a series of paintings on a subject that the artist, born in Tokyo in 1936, knows all too well: the atomic bomb and its devastation of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. The resulting works were to have been exhibited in a show opening at that gallery on Aug. 6, 2009, the day of Hiroshima's annual World Peace Memorial gathering in Peace Memorial Park. Then came the worldwide financial meltdown. The gallery's owner and its backer both declared bankruptcy and Nakazato's show was history - or so he thought.

Enter Daniel Dalseth, a former student of Nakazato at the University of Pennsylvania and owner of the Pageant Soloveev Gallery. Dalseth, who had shown Nakazato's paintings at his gallery in 2005 and also had written about his work, offered the artist a summer slot that would include Aug. 6.

Thinking back to Guernica, Picasso's visceral condemnation of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Nakazato, a colorist of many years' standing, decided on a black-and-white palette for the 30 panel paintings and six monoprints that make up Hiroshima Revisited. His small paintings - which are mounted in grid formations and in which wide, transparent strokes of matte black acrylic are intercepted by white outlines of vaguely familiar, recurring shapes (a periscope, a magnifying glass, a wave) - also bring film cels to mind. The monoprints, in the front of the gallery, comprise complex arrangements of shapes and suggest scroll paintings and banners.

Initially, I found myself wishing for a few large paintings - not necessarily of Guernica's monumental dimensions, but of a much greater scale than the 19-by-30-inch panels on view here. I could easily imagine their floating imagery extending far beyond its borders. Not much later, though, it struck me that the serial, snapshot, in-motion character of these paintings added up to something much larger. I just had to stand back.

Schmidt-Dean Gallery's "Cool Stuff, New People" has a lot of fun, provocative, elegant, and mysterious new stuff.

Not every artist is new to the gallery, though. Leila Cartier, an alumna of a one-person show here, is represented by a big, baroque, luscious oil painting of a pair of larger-than-life pink cockatoos. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the small, self-possessed wall-mounted boxes of Ted Larsen, another gallery artist, made with recycled steel, wood, and wax.

Krista Steinke's technicolor confrontational photograph, Maiden was in the garden, is a startling image of a small girl sitting with a gigantic glass water bottle in her lap; Ida Weygandt's color photograph, Thicket, showing a woman moving through a jungle of trees and bittersweet vines, is similarly unexpected and enchanted.

Dan Kornrumpf isn't the first artist to embroider images onto canvas, but his tiny portraits in silk sewn into unprimed canvas are so fastidiously rendered, and his subjects so incongruously gritty and tabloidy, you just have to smile.

There's a robot for everyone in Robert Morgan's paintings of "bot" types - even gang members - in every conceivable situation.

But Tracy Stuckey's graphite drawings of a model-like character in questionable scenes with a cowboy, two white poodles, and a coyote on the prowl are the coolest works in the show, hands down.