Art review: 'Martin Prekop' at Art Space 616 in Sewickley

Sewickley's newest gallery, Art Space 616, recently opened its inaugural exhibition featuring the work Martin Prekop, Carnegie Mellon University art professor and former dean of the College of Fine Arts there (1993-2005), and one of Pittsburgh's most renowned and respected artists.

Prekop has exhibited his work internationally over the past 40 years, and this exhibit is a mini-retrospective of sorts, touching on each decade of the artist's illustrious career.

As visitors will see, Prekop's work is a perfect fit for the 4,400-square-foot gallery, which, until recently, was home to Monte Cello's Italian Restaurant and previously a car dealership.

Featuring photographs, paintings, sculpture and installation art, much of the work is based in photography, which has been a consistent medium of choice for the artist as well as a way of processing the world.

“I work primarily in black and white and have my whole life,” the artist says. “Partly because I work from photographs when creating drawings or paintings.”

Prekop loves to play with positives and negatives and repeating patterns of black and white.

For example, in the middle of the gallery is an installation of photographs, “House 1993-2014,” that takes up both sides of a long, freestanding wall. Most of the images take the form of paper negatives that feature the interior and exterior of his Fox Chapel home, as well as the yard, in high-contrast, black-and-white images.

What visitors most likely will notice in the photographs is that the house's exterior, and some of the interior, is covered in mirrors.

After moving to Pittsburgh in 1993 to take the position of dean of the College of Fine Arts at CMU, Prekop, along with wife Martha and son Zak, moved into the “biggest house we could afford.”

“It was kind of a run-down, fairly ugly house that I bought because it was in a good school district,” Prekop says. “At that time, my youngest son was just starting high school.”

Not satisfied with an ugly house, Prekop says, “I started to sort of jazz it up by covering every brick of the house with a mirror. And I started doing things on the inside of the house as well.”

Prekop even went so far as to make changes to the yard.

For example, a couple of trees were hit by lightning, so he made them into art installations by covering them with mirrors.

At either end of the Art Space 616 exhibit hang two massive paintings — “Measured Painting” (2007) and “Painting With Bubble Levels” (2011). Having T-squares, rulers and levels defining linear compositions, they look more like displays in a hardware store than art.

“They are paintings only in the sense that they are flat and painted white,” Prekop says, alluding to the large, white rectangles the measuring devices are attached to.

Measurement has been a constant theme in the artist's work, which is evidenced by the earliest pieces on display, photographs from his “Ruler Trees” series from 1972, in which he precariously placed rulers between aspen trees and photographed them.

Rulers, and similar measuring devices, reappear throughout Prekop's work over his 40-year career.

For example, “Tape Measure Painting” (2010) is simply made up of several tape measures hung in front of a framed piece of plywood painted white.

“Red Interval Painting” and “Black Interval Painting” (both 2013) do not contain rulers, but allude to them, being measured lines of color either painted onto or cut into wood panel.

“They are based on the idea of marking time, as in a ruler,” Prekop says. “And also with some concern I've had with music and rhythm, repetition and so forth.”

Not all of the works on display are so monochromatic. On the rear wall, six massive “Frame Paintings” (2011) fill a nearly 70-foot expanse.

Featuring framed rectangles of complementary colors framed within each other, Prekop says, “These have to do with resurrecting my interest in color.

“They really are exercises in color, so a lot of time was spent coming up with those combinations of colors, and then incorporating them so they were half frame and half painting.

“One of the reasons I was excited to show in this beautiful gallery was that there was this 70 running feet of wall space.”

And to that end, it serves the display of these wonderful works nicely.

Kurt Shaw is the art critic for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at kshaw@tribweb.com.