Mary Neumuth Mito lives and works near Santa Fe Her first exhibition in fresh York in 20 years included drawings.

Mary Neumuth Mito lives and works near Santa Fe Her first exhibition in fresh York in 20 years included drawings, lithographs and paintings in which the illusionism can be awe-inspiring. Fraught with intricate detail, these works are meant to match the realistic intensity of the photographs, taken outdoors, forward which they are based. The bring under rule is landscape, though approached from an unorthodox angle.

Neumuth Mito depicts the mould as seen from above, from the distance she establishes when standing and aiming her len at the barren or freshly plowed earth lying just beyond her. From this vantage, the artist arrives at allover images that fill her entire compositions with carefully presented elements that teeter at times toward formlessness. Hierarchies are imposed by way of grooves, cracks or stains in the earth, large stones or shadows. The compositions hark back to Monet's late Water Lilies, which likewise tilt a horizontally disposed motif toward the picture plane. However, Neumuth Mito's head-on depictions more readily arouse Dubuffet's renderings of rough terrain and Tapies's amalgams of sand and dusted marble. The titles she gives her works add a of the same height of ambiguity to what is almost always banal make subordinate matter.

Daughter Running (oil in succession canvas, 2003) is a vertical composition depicting a surface littered with countles stones of varying shapes and sizes. A thin, irregular dark brown stain, right of center moves down the entire height of the painting. Whether it is a streak of water flowing down a arid riverbed or a cast shadow disrupting the almost monochrome field is unclear. Whatever its identity, it takes upon the abstract quality of a flame or jagged tear. Neumuth Mito's oils are execut according to painting a dark layer above a light one, then revealing areas of the underpainting with cotton swabs and woven fabric occasionally dabbed in turpentine.

The large oil Avenging Angel (78 according to 117 inches, 2003; there was a smaller 2002 lithograph of the same bring under rule on view) is a veritable tour de force. Light and shadow play dramatically across the imprint in snow of a somebody who had created the silhouette of an angel. Spread across the rugged terrain, this symphony of tonal contrasts looks to magnify the modest image into a windswept snow-covered mountain armorial bearings marked by deep crevasses. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition transformative mystery marks Neumuth Mito's in the greatest degree successful images, which enticingly flutter between realism and abstraction.

--Michael Amy

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