Art on Paper NYC September 4-7 - The Debbie Dickinson Gallery show, Convergence will be in Booth G-23

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST September 4, 2025

The Debbie Dickinson Gallery show, Convergence will be in Booth G-23, and it isn’t promoting some budding Ism, indeed quite the reverse. What Dickinson, a seasoned curator, has put together here is a group of seven artists who are wholly unalike in their practices, which include abstraction, figuration and photography, but despite the difference between their working methods, the show wholly coheres, creating a criss-cross cat’s cradle of shared art dialog.

Iran Issa Khan | Golden Pleasure | Archival Pigment Print | 72" x 48" | 2005 | 

  Iran Issa Khan’s photography endows natural forms with a powerful aesthetic presence. As when she drew on the lighting and composition skills she had acquired as a fashion  photographer to magic a giant chunk of yellow coral into a piece with a form, color and texture that transform it into a  luminous apparition.

  Bill Buchman’s Zentopia series, are fluid acrylics, painted in variations of blue, which channel the visual language of abstract expressionism while at once messaging a spiritual element and communicating a sense of motion. He is large on brush gesture, personal expression,  bringing us into a space  where abstraction communicates both emotion and thought.

S.L. Fuller | Bebe | India Ink on Arches Cold Pressed Paper | 24" x 18" | 2024 | 

   S.L. Fuller’s series, Les Demoiselles, draws effectively upon the  Early Modernist sensibility of Art Deco, the killer style of the Roaring 20s, or Les Annees Folles, meaning The Mad Years in French, as Les Demoiselles themselves might prefer it. S.L. Fuller’s female figures positively breathe sophistication, sometimes hinting at heavy breathing, but she is reflecting upon the contemporary culture, her Neo Deco references luxury, beauty, social identity.

 Al Diaz | Because War... | Giclee Print AP | 24" x 18" | 2019 | 

  Al Diaz entered art history as the partner of Jean-Michel Basquiat in SAMO, a shared love of words being one of the main things that brought them together, and it was just that which put them on the crest of the wave of Street Art that was surging in New York City. But SAMO then blew up. Al Diaz now makes art for indoor walls but he still loved words and in 2008 he started to collect WET PAINT signs, cutting them up and playing word games with the letters. Which became the makings of his strong new art.

  Michael Katz, a painter with a background in the creative practices of the fashion world, paints vigorous abstractions in which areas of vibrant and  muscular pigmentation are balanced by placid spaces of white. The works can look at once turbulent and intricately micro-managed, suggesting an on-going truce between the ebullient power of chaos and the soothing presence of control.

Carole Bolger | Been There and Back | graphite, acrylic, dye, arches | 60” x 40” | 2023 | (Description - Stacked Houses)
 

   Art is my religion, complete with practices and icons, Carole Bolger has written. Her concept of “Architectural Existentialism leads her to examine space, structure, human experience within constructed environments. She uses architectural motifs not to celebrate form but to question it, as with her toytown of teetering houses in magic inks and dyes and she uses foamcore boards because she relishes working with paper. “I’ll put it up and bash away,” Bolger says  “Sometimes you wreck it, sometimes you make it better.” 

  So to Haden-Guest. Okay, cartoonery isn’t fine art. There’s an element of mystery in art making as many artists have observed but cartoonists have a job to do, which is to deliver a comic idea. Of course, certain cartoonists, mostly gone, have made works that look as strong on the wall or the page as art. Mine? I’ll leave that critique to others. And the Splattoons? Those are cartoons gone so much to the bad that they look pretty good to me. WM