Oska Gutheil “The Last Kind” at Gallery 1969
(ABOVE) Oska Gutheil, “Bug with Orange 2″
(BELOW) Joseph Stella, “In the Garden of Eden”
Oska’s short and glossy strokes of colorful paint render pensive bugs, ugly doll looking stuffed animals with “x’s” for genital holes, inquisitive people in spooky forests and a tiled floored room with a chair. His paintings use elongated versions of pointillism and animated version of impressionism. The first painting I see of a purple shiny beetle grasping an orange (at first glance thought it was a pumpkin) reminds me of a Halloween version of Joseph Stella’s “In the Garden of Eden” and “Still Life“. Both artists use rich dark shades of cool colors and curvy sexy vegetables.
(ABOVE) Oska Gutheil, “One of the Last Kinds”
(BELOW) Nicolas de Staël, “study”
A detail in, “One of the Last Kinds” Gutheil conceptualized and visualized light in fragments similar to Nicolas de Staël’s “study”. The most iconic way to symbolize light is with the prism of light, alike Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover. That’s what’s so cool about Gutheil’s work; the details in the paintings reminded me of numerous painters and associations from all time periods. But once I stood back seeing the works as a whole, they could only belong to the talented Oska Gutheil!