Six artists at Artists' House Gallery

Since this is the first time I've visited Artists' House Gallery, I don't know whether these Sky Bar-type exhibitions are a regular feature or if I happened upon a special. If it's the proprietors' normal mode of hosting an exhibit, I salute them. This six-in-one approach allows a half-dozen artists to be seen without having to produce a large number of exhibit-worthy works. Besides, sometimes five carefully chosen pieces will give you a better sense of what the artist is about than 50 will.

David Palumbo claims pride of place here, both by reason of location— he's in the front gallery— and scope. He has 17 oils on display, most of them fairly small, but you'll also find several fair-sized pieces and one giant work executed in a "Cinemascope" format.

Palumbo's works here are almost entirely concerned with the human figure, aside from one small oil of two horses grazing in a meadow. Rather than pursuing photographic realism, Palumbo opts for a form of depiction that wouldn't be far out of place in a graphic novel. This approach works especially well for his nudes, giving them an immediacy that a more composed academic approach would rob them of.

Haunting redemption

In the next gallery there are six portraits of women by Katherine Fraser, most fairly large, which possess a dash reminiscent of the full-length portraits of Giovanni Boldini. At least one— Little Secrets— conveys a real Art Nouveau sensibility, although I found the large portrait, Redemption Song, the most haunting of Fraser's works.

On one of the walls adjacent to Fraser— and forming quite a contrast—you'll find six small oils by Brian Burt. Burt's works are technically still lifes, but he endows them with a human quality by including objects like photographs and bobble-head toys. Burt makes collages of the disparate objects he paints, often to a satirical effect, as in The Mile High Club, and at times he achieves a trompe l'oeil effect, as in his paintings Corrugated #1 and Asian Plum.

Feminine elegance

Moving toward the center of the gallery, you find six oils and eleven etchings by Dori Spector. The oils are genre pieces depicting people relaxing and playing on the beach, and I found her works on paper far more interesting. Whether consciously or not, Spector's pale-colored evocations of feminine elegance evoke the heady atmosphere of the Art Deco work of artists like Erte and George Barbier.

The small back gallery displays nine oils by Ed Bronstein, which portray scenes of everyday life: the exteriors of houses on tree-lined streets, comfy interiors. It's a nice world.

Across the wall, Stephen Takats presents us with the other extreme— the forlorn and gritty streets of Kensington and North Philadelphia. Takats depicts old houses and abandoned factories with an almost geometrical precision, and the heavy textures of his small paintings endow them with concreteness and a sense of gravitas.