Grimaldis

Who knew Baltimore's devastating fire of 1904 could look so cool? Not that artist David Brewster intended such an effect. But his large, strikingly colored works depicting that event, displayed in the "Conflagration" exhibit at C. Grimaldis Gallery, entertain the eye as much as they capture history. The bold orange and brown strokes of oil in the epic-sized "Spectacular Destruction/Great Baltimore Fire: View Southeast from Continental Trust Building (1904)" make a particularly compelling impression.

Two cool summertime art exhibits located in different neighborhoods, and very much in different financial brackets, provide welcome diversion from the heat. C. Grimaldis Gallery in Mount Vernon offers a show that brings together several notable artists who have long been associated with the gallery, including Grace Hartigan, Eugene Leake and Anthony Caro. The price tags: $1,500 to $90,000. School 33 in Federal Hill has the diverse "Magically Suspicious" show on one floor, and two spaces devoted to individual artists upstairs.

Alexey Titarenko's black-and-white photographs conjure up gray areas between motion and inertia, living and getting by, past and present. The images haunt, and are haunted. For the third time since 2003, Baltimore's C. Grimaldis Gallery is presenting a Titarenko exhibit. This one focuses on the place where the 50-year-old Russian photographer was born — known then as Leningrad and, since the fall of the Soviet government, as St. Petersburg. The photographer, whose works have been exhibited widely and are now in museums in Europe and the U.S., started taking pictures in the 1970s but stayed largely underground until perestroika allowed for freer artistic expression.

Alexey Titarenko's black-and-white photographs conjure up gray areas between motion and inertia, living and getting by, past and present. The images haunt, and are haunted. For the third time since 2003, Baltimore's C. Grimaldis Gallery is presenting a Titarenko exhibit. This one focuses on the place where the 50-year-old Russian photographer was born — known then as Leningrad and, since the fall of the Soviet government, as St. Petersburg. The photographer, whose works have been exhibited widely and are now in museums in Europe and the U.S., started taking pictures in the 1970s but stayed largely underground until perestroika allowed for freer artistic expression.

The rear gallery at Grimaldis has the big news now.As usual in summer, the larger front gallery has a group show of Grimaldis' regular artists -- Grace Hartigan, Eugene Leake, Mel Kendrick and others. But gallery owner Constantine Grimaldis, who usually shows well-established artists, gives his rear gallery this month and next to two recent graduates of the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, both former students of Grace Hartigan."I felt that they should be seen," he says.

"Geometric Abstraction," writes distinguished art curator Charles Millard, is "a continuation of the classical tradition . . . [and] perhaps the most important of the 20th century expressions in paint of the spirit of Poussin and Ingres, as opposed to Rubens and Delacroix, the contemporary embodiment of the linear, as opposed to the painterly."The large, handsome exhibit of "Geometric Abstraction" at Grimaldis is accompanied by Millard's succinct and informative essay, whose points are much in evidence in the show.

The elements of landscape are so amenable to variations of treatment that it's not surprising they have been used by all manner of artists, from realists to abstract expressionists. This month the C. Grimaldis Gallery at 523 N. Charles St. has "Perceptual Painting: Landscape" (through July 27), bringing together a group of artists who use landscapes in differing ways, with differing results and differing degrees of success.Of the six painters represented, Wolf Kahn's quiet oils withtheir pastel-like colors may seem at first the most modest of all. But in Kahn there is a distillation of color and a depth of feeling thatpersist and expand in the consciousness.

A visit to Grimaldis' summer group show brings back the past with such a rush that it's almost like an exercise in escape. Not that we're talking nostalgia here; these artists are not that kind. But their works do recall other eras.Grace Hartigan, who often mines art history, gives us "Ask Me No More," a painting that features a hefty couple who might be a Venus and Adonis borrowed from Rubens. They face John Van Alstine's sculpture "Implement XXV (River Arc)," whose components include half of a stone mill wheel and a curving bronze element inspired by a scythe handle.

The C. Grimaldis Gallery, one of Baltimore's leadin commercial art galleries, will move from its present location at 1006 Morton St. to downtown Charles Street in March.Gallery owner Constantine Grimaldis said yesterday that his new space would be on Charles Street but that he couldn't confirm an exact location because negotiations were continuing.The Mitchell Baker Galerie will be vacating Grimaldis' former site at 523 N. Charles St. at the end of January, and there is speculation that Grimaldis would move there.

The California-based conceptual artist John Baldessari gained a reputation in the 1960s and '70s for works that combined texts and photographic images in ways that forced viewers to reconsider the relationship between word and image. Baldessari was challenging our notions about meaning in art, and even our notions about what could be considered art.It's possible to take a crash course in Baldessari at the moment. If the exhibit of his recent work running at the Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore through Jan. 12 has you wondering where this guy is coming from, why then simply take a trip to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, where an extensive Baldessari retrospective remains through Jan. 6.One of the more notable aspects of the retrospective is to see how Baldessari's recent work is less reliant on printed words and makes more extensive use of paint applied to the photographic imagery.

Engaging, museum-level work fills two venues in Baltimore. Maryland Art Place has assembled a remarkable survey of minimalist painters from different areas and generations, while C. Grimaldis Gallery is offering a collection of pieces by five exceptional artists who produced work locally. The Grimaldis show, "Five Maryland Icons," provides a richly varied experience — and, for those in the market, a fairly expensive one, with most of the pieces priced from $3,500 to $125,000.

For some, the sight of a faceless garage or a squat chain store or a long stretch of tract housing barely registers; there's just nothing unusual about such things. For artist Sofia Silva, they mean a lot. And, once framed by her camera lens, they are imbued with provocative power. Nearly a dozen of Silva's photographs form an exhibit, "Meditations on the Landscape of Desire," one of two solo shows on display at C. Grimaldis Gallery (the other show features intriguing sculptural pieces by Lu Zhang)

One way to counter the heat is with a jolt of cool contemporary art, and exhibits at two commercial venues — C. Grimaldis Gallery in Mount Vernon, Jordan Faye Contemporary in Federal Hill — conveniently provide such relief. For good measure, the Jordan Faye gallery is also throwing a block party Saturday afternoon. "That seemed like a great summer thing to do," says founder and owner Jordan Faye Block. This sort of gesture has helped make the gallery a good fit for the neighborhood since opening 11 months ago in a handsome 1880s building that originally housed a branch of the Enoch Pratt Library.

Who knew Baltimore's devastating fire of 1904 could look so cool? Not that artist David Brewster intended such an effect. But his large, strikingly colored works depicting that event, displayed in the "Conflagration" exhibit at C. Grimaldis Gallery, entertain the eye as much as they capture history. The bold orange and brown strokes of oil in the epic-sized "Spectacular Destruction/Great Baltimore Fire: View Southeast from Continental Trust Building (1904)" make a particularly compelling impression.

The horizontal, rectangular photograph, stretching 80 inches across a wall of C. Grimaldis Gallery, jolts the viewer with a sea of aluminum siding. In the far left corner, a piece of bold blue sky can be seen behind a jutting, K-style gutter. Welcome to "Wasteland." This image by Sofia Silva, titled "siding," is one of 20 compelling works in an exhibit that casts an eye - at once coolly objective and hotly provocative - on a desensitized world. "It's about wasted time, wasted things, wasted political systems," Grimaldis says of the show, which features six artists, most of them local.

If you didn't know that this is National Opera Week, a glance at the local scene would make you suspect something of the kind. Three companies in Baltimore alone will be busy with performances; add in College Park and Washington, and it looks like an epidemic. The designation of Nov. 13 to 22 as National Opera Week (easier to market than National Opera Ten-Day Period) was made by Opera America, the service organization representing about 150 companies, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A "stable" show, such as C. Grimaldis has at his 523 N. Charles St. gallery through April 13, is hard to review. Consisting of one to three works by each of a baker's dozen of artists whom the gallery regularly shows, it doesn't give an in-depth look at anybody and includes some works seen before.The show is not without its points of interest, however. The principal one this time comes from two landscapes by Henry Coe, "Owls Starting to Call" and "Hutchins Mill Pasture." Rash as it may be to go out on a limb on the basis of such a sampling, it just possible that Coe has taken a significant step since his last show here.

Renowned Baltimore painter Grace Hartigan returns to C. Grimaldis Gallery this month with a delightful exhibition of works on paper spanning her career from the 1950s to the present. Hartigan is well known as a painter; she made her reputation as a pioneering abstract-expressionist in New York during the 1950s, when her peers included artists like Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. The Grimaldis exhibition presents vivid examples of how Hartigan successfully translated the Ab-Exers' signature "all-over" style to works on paper rather than canvas.

At the opening night party for the "Sublime Structure" exhibit at C. Grimaldis Gallery, featured artist Lu Zhang's creative hand wasn't just apparent in her paintings on the wall. The 26-year-old artist and model designer for Development Design Group makes a statement with her personal style, too. "My style is all over the place. I like to put my own spin on things but not really stand out too much. ... I think it's a combination of going to art school and now [working] in the corporate environment for an architectural firm.

"The Universe and the Side of My Body," a huge study in red oil on wood by Kim Manfredi, is not just an eye-catcher in the new show at C. Grimaldis Gallery. It's deeply provocative. A couple of sagging globs of paint on the upper portion of the four, 96-inch-square panels seem to be on the verge of shifting downward, threatening to invade two circular images formed by the perforation of tiny holes with a drill. Those orbs simultaneously suggest microscopic cells and planets adrift in a blood-dense sky. The piece is representative of the intriguing premise of "Sublime Structure," an exhibit that features several Maryland Institute College of Art alumni.