Uman is remaking her paintings. The intuitive marks and characteristically eye-dazzling colors of her mostly abstract work have begun to knit into a complex, self-aware new visual language.
Part of that self-awareness may be a side effect of success, or of unremitting work; in addition to her latest exhibit at Nicola Vassell, she has her first museum solo show, at the Aldrich, with another exhibit coming up next summer at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art.
But it’s also a product of critical mass. Her paintings were already full of loops, squiggles, ladybugs, fried eggs, miniature trans flags and all sorts of other motifs. But there are now so many of them that they’ve achieved a sort of doubleness, functioning as elements in a larger system even while maintaining the force of autonomous expressive marks.
Many of the squares in a large grid called “tiny paintings in tiny boxes #2” are effectively white monochromes. But you can also enjoy them for the very different way they appear surrounded by borders of dark red or lime green, or as they shimmer like tiles in the painting’s overall composition.
In textile-inflected works like “busbas” or “medusa’s disco,” Uman uses seams as just another class of painterly mark. But then, with lines of lighter color, she reiterates them, as if to emphasize that everything in her paintings is now pulling twice its weight.
