Ghosts of Art Shows Almost Past

Thanks to Charles Dickens, we tend to associate late December with ghosts, which makes this Saturday between noon and 4 p.m. a most appropriate time to haunt the Duane Reed Gallery (7513 Forsyth Boulevard, Clayton; www.duanereedgallery.com or 314-862-2333), as Nancy Newman Rice's ghostly urban paintings and Ross Richmond's haunting glass objects are on display for one last day. In oil on canvas, Rice creates shadowy city scenes suffused with light and awash in muted pinks, blues and yellows. Works such as Blue Umbrella and City Reflections (pictured) catch only the ghosts of urban figures; the paintings themselves seem wet with rain. Handblown and hot-sculpted, Richmond's busts and torsos are ghoulishly de-animated and re-inhabited. In Home Is #2, the human trunk is a tree trunk pecked by a woodpecker. In both artists' work, the ghosts of cities and bodies past, present and to come are compelling reasons to visit Duane Reed before the shows disappear.
Sat., Dec. 29, 2007