February 11, 1999
The Washington Post
Numark Gallery currently has a double-barreled delight in its exhibition of sculptures by Tony Feher and prints and paintings by David Row, two big name artists whose works couldn’t be more different.
Feher, who is a genius at turning common objects and banal materials into vibrant, engaging works of art, has turned the gallery’s front room into a site-specific installation that makes the space seem like a clandestine ,monomer t to American life.
Using stacks of plastic milk crates, pink plastic foam bricks, a line of colored push pins and some plastic beverage bottles partially filled with water and hung from a rope that traverses the gallery, Feher succeeds in totally redefining the room upward. The viewer’s eye is lifted toward the heavens, as surely as if one were looking at the Washington Monument. And when we look down again, his ‘D.C. Five and Dime,” a jewellike piece made by grouping nickels and dimes in a tight circle on the floor and scattering seine dear glass marbles across them, offers a reminder that all that glitters is not gold; or even unalloyed silver.
Row’s works are more traditional but no less compelling explorations of form and space. In recent years, Row has worked primarily with a gestural stroke that resembles a loose spiral in some works and an ellipse in others. From those simple forms, he achieves a great variety of compositional permutations, ranging from flat, agitated fields to endlessly deep wells of color.
Tony Feller and David Row, at Numark Gallery through Feb. 20.