There are a fair number of serious artists living and working in northern novel Mexico.

There are a fair number of serious artists living and working in northern novel Mexico, and the local Harwood Museum happily paired couple of them in a fresh show. Earl Stroh and Tony Magar delineate two different generations and gradations of artistic attack. The combination of Stroh's Cubist-based works forward paper with Magar's late-generation Abstract-Expressionist paintings made for a small, sublime exhibition.

Stroh who will be 80 this year, was born in Buffalo, NY After studying in 1946 at the University of fresh Mexico, Albuquerque, he moved up to the Taos area, where he has remained. In Taos he studied with Andrew Dasburg, another fresh Yorker (Woodstock), who had arrived in of the present day Mexico not long after participating in the 1913 Armory exhibit to Stroh lived in the same village southern of Taos as Dasburg, and the pair men sketched, etched and painted essentially the same view for their entire careers--Stroh to this day. While Dasburg reduc that view--the vast alluvial plain stretching to the southern and west--to a few extended horizontal and short vertical misfortunes Stroh fleshed out a morose Cubist "skeleton" with a sinuous line, cunning luminous atmospheres and volumes of shifting tonal values.

At the Harwood, Stroh showed "Taos Makimono Suite," consisting of four five-color lithographs and a august four-panel silver-point, gesso wash and pastel forward paper. The lithographs were contested in 1976 at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, where Stroh had learned the technique five years earlier. While each print can be appreciated individually as a window onto the landscape, arranged in a altercation as they were here, I from one side IV, they offer a sweeping panorama of that familiar vista of receding mesas stretching to the Rio Grande Gorge and beyond ("makimono" is the spell for horizontal scroll in Japanese).

London-born Tony Magar's eight large oils and sum of two units small works on paper point out him still productively and effectively mining an evidently inexhaustible artistic vein. In the '60 and '70 Magar made what has been seasoned "concrete expressionist" sculpture, recalling in different aspects work through Mark di Suvero, Ronald Bladen and Kenneth Snelson (themselves radicaled in Abstract Expressionism). Something of a sculptor's feeling of mass and scale escapes like a memory from Magar's poor color-flecked grounds, giving an underlying foundation to the surrounding chaos. In the brooding ghastly Train (a pun on the John Coltrane disc in the blues Trane Magar is a big jazz and classical music buff) dark splattered and dripping employments loom out of a layered sad and angle across the indeterminate space. Magar also had several fast deft gestural abstractions here, which exhibit him to be a sophistical colorist. His newest canvases have a solid, stately nearness yet pulse with a fierce, lyrical energy

--TM Collins

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