Patrick Graham, "Deposition, Study 6," 2009

“Patrick Graham: Fact of the Matter” featured eight large, dramatic canvases by the Dublin-based artist, mostly from the late ’80s, and nearly two dozen recent drawings.

Blending abstraction and representation, the powerful paintings were layered with words, symbols, expressive gestures, and complex color combinations. The standout oil-on-canvas The Man (1986) immediately draws the viewer’s attention with its slashing strokes of paint obscuring the seated subject’s face only slowly does it become clear that forceful brushstrokes elsewhere hide tender renderings of a rabbit, a dog, and a bird. The sense of innocence buried and forgotten is palpable.

By contrast, Graham’s drawings, in the back gallery, had a feeling of hesitancy, incompleteness, and ideas struggling to surface. In the mixed-media-on-board Drawing I (2009), one of the stronger pieces, a figure reels back in apparent anguish in an undefined space; to the left is a smaller, almost ghostly back view of what appears to be the same figure. In a side gallery, “Arshile Gorky: Sketch - book Drawings”—complementing the concurrent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles— provided a look into the Armenian American painter’s process from the early to mid-’30s. Done mostly in graphite on paper, these drawings are blueprints of the artist’s experiments with symbols and abstraction. Although none of the compositions match known paintings, many of their symbols later found their way into more elaborate paintings. Picasso is an obvious influence, and there are also echoes of Braque and Kandinsky. An untitledwork from 1934 features two clearly delineated figures leaning toward each other, their stances somehow calling to mind the relationship between a master and an apprentice.

The only Gorky canvas here, Abstraction (Conflicting Emotions), from 1936–37, is a dense thicket in brooding tones made in collaboration with Hans Burkhardt. The haunting painting, which abstractly depicts two figures against a black background, speaks equally of turbulent domestic circumstances and threats in the larger world.

—Richard Chang