A question of taste...

Submitted byJeeraik009 onSat, 11/26/2011 - 15:55

 

Oddities is in exhibition selected by Amaicraft gallery owner Herman van Asbroeck that displays his interest in strange and wonderful objects. It is an ecclectic range of expressionist paintings, historical prints, tribal masks, contemporary photographs and disarming curios that speaks to this collector's essentially modernist sensibility. Walking through the warm red upper rooms of his small framing business in Kingston and experiencing the juxtaposition of works by 19th century printmaker Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795-1849), the late painter Milton George (1939-2008), intuitive Albert Artwell (b.1942 ) or the Cuban Roberto Fabelo (b.1951) brings to mind the connoisseurship of Parisian collectors such as Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979) or poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 – 1919) whose financial support and intellect provided the backdrop to that city's avant-garde movement. Oddities' strange and wonderful marriage of objects, with Caribbean art at its core, demonstrates Herman van Asbroeck's discerning taste but also the extent to which this region's art deserves to be part of a larger story about western art and modernism.