New York
Review of the BLOM &
DORN Gallery exhibition by Ray Matthew of Art World magazine New York
January 1985.
"For the last several months Blom & Dorn has been the most
interesting and least disconcerting of the open doorways in New York.
They have consistently displayed two or three artists as a
"group". The artists have had nothing in common but the desire
to make art speak. That, of course, and the competence to speak to what
I take to be Blom & Dorn's pancreatic sense of humanism.
These three painters - from England, Denmark, Israel - share an
immediacy of appeal, a sensuality of approach. Each flirts away from
abstraction. Their representationalism is an aesthetic strip-tease with
the emphasis - as is traditional - on the tease.
The most naked, and most exposed is Terry Duffy. His urgent burnt-out
naked man, consumed in the glow of fire and damnation, cries out:
"The room was demolished. The house was demolished. But I am still
there…..!" Duffy has something of a very early, very Australian
Nolan and Boyd. There is nakedness everywhere - and there is Someone Who
Sees. His totemist "Bird of Paradise (preys above)" says it
all. Hellfire and damnation are never out of date. Duffy is painting the
hellscape of the heart."
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