Michael Ellis

From my review of Michael Ellis at Anthony Greany Gallery:

Michael Ellis of Boston also demonstrates his mastery of craft, with photorealist paintings at Anthony Greaney Gallery. One looks like a blow-up of a postcard of a mountain range. (It's actually from a photo taken by Ellis's brother.) Up close it seems to have been painted mainly with lots of grayed blue and green horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, but step back five feet and it becomes a crisp photo…

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Michael Ellis at Anthony Greany, 450 Harrison Ave., Boston, Feb. 6 to March 28, 2009.

Pictured from top to bottom: Michael Ellis, all untitled.

Darren Foote

From my review of Darren Foote at Judi Rotenberg Gallery:

Darren Foote of South Boston (the fiancé of Rotenberg director Kristen Dodge) fashions oak and poplar into trompe-l'oeil mutant furniture. A chair has crumpled. Wooden "rays" from a table lamp bend the top of a table. A pair of chairs standing next to each other seem to have been wounded on their abutting sides by some mysterious menace that's melted the seats and spindles down to jagged edges. His standout sculpture is “Bulb.” A bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling appears to have been shattered and the shards scattered across the floor.

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Darren Foote, Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury St., Boston, Feb. 5 to March 1, 2009.

Pictured from top to bottom: Darren Foote, “Two Chairs,” 2009; “Bulb,” 2009; “Entry Table,” 2009; all courtesy of Judi Rotenberg Gallery.

Sheila Gallagher

From my review of Sheila Gallagher at Judi Rotenberg Gallery:

Sheila Gallagher of Jamaica Plain presents her first Boston exhibition since she showed at the Institute of Contemporary Art as one of the finalists for its 2006 Foster Prize. Gallagher is known for technical feats in multiple media — her ICA show included paintings made from smoke, a video, and (my favorite piece in that show) a wall of live flowers, with built-in irrigation, that vaguely formed a picture of a cloud and grandly evoked the particularly middle-class sublime of wedding corsages and trickling desktop Zen fountains. Here she offers new paintings of a horseshoe crab and a sea urchin made by staining the canvases brown, blue, black, and green with smoke...

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Sheila Gallagher, Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury St., Boston, Feb. 5 to March 1, 2009.

Pictured from top to bottom: Sheila Gallagher, “Daily Calendar Mandala,” 2009; “Sea Urchin,” 2009; “Horseshoe Crab,” 2009; “SOS,” 2009, all courtesy of Judi Rotenberg Gallery.

Julie Miller

From my review of an exhibit of Julie Miller’s drawings:

Steven Zevitas Gallery is also focusing on abstraction with a show of Julie Miller’s new, brightly hued pen drawings. This Bostonian fills sheets of paper with zillions of teensy fine-line circles. Her similar drawings in DeCordova's "Big Bang" exhibition suggested microscopic views of skin or circulating blood cells. The works here feel more like straight-up abstractions focused on a single color or a few similar hues. “o (18)” features purple and blue stripes; “o (19)” is a slippery field of red and orange circles that seem to shift and subtly throb. Sometimes they bring to mind dotted color-blindness test charts.

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Julie Miller, “Recent Work,” Steven Zevitas Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., Boston, Jan. 22 to Feb. 28, 2009.

Pictured from top to bottom: Julie Miller, “o (19),” “o (18),” and “o (20),” all ink on paper, 2008.