Peggy Cyphers at the Front Room Gallery (Hudson, New York)

Installation view, Peggy Cyphers at Front Room Gallery. Hudson, NY.

By JONATHAN GOODMAN May 23, 2024

The painter Peggy Cyphers has had some thirty solo shows in New York and internationally; her current exhibition takes place in Hudson, an art-oriented town two hours north of New York (the poet and art critic John Ashbery lived there). Cyphers, a Professor at Pratt Institute, creates works that pull together influences as diverse as Chinese calligraphy and landscape art, indigenous peoples’ formal and thematic practices (likely most evident in the artist’s orientation toward nature), and the established, often emotional language of the New York School. 

Cyphers often uses a quadrant framework, in which complex patterns, abstract but also indicative of geological formations, fill the four-part space. Something like a cross of blue sky, or water, separates the parts of the quadrant. The unusual structure generates beauty and  spirituality–not a quality we expect for this time.

The artist’s achievement is all that more remarkable for its eclecticism, which she transforms notably into something believable as an entirety. The process is intuitive and even ethereal. Its values, entirely oriented toward art, quietly contrast with today’s over-intellectualism, or too personal a politics. In these landscapes, forms vie with visions of almost mythic energy, giving voice to contemporary report. 

Installation view, Peggy Cyphers at Front Room Gallery.

Bullfrog Pond (2018-23), smaller than other works but visually complex, portrays a large bullfrog on the upper right–or at least it seems so–and perhaps a monumental creature on the left. But both images are stylized, making it hard to be sure. In the middle of the painting, on the right are curling black lines that could be seen as nod to Chinese calligraphy. Then, on the bottom, we see grassy passages in gray, green, and red.

The thin, light blue cross dividing the composition could be a pond if we assume we are looking downward, or a piece of the sky if we direct our gaze above. The nature presented here is idiosyncratic in the extreme, but that is a conscious decision on Cyphers’ part-it happens a lot in her paintings. Thematic content exists here, but it is masked by eccentricity. We never really know how to view the paintings, which actually adds to their mystery and power.

Cyphers tends to reiterate the quadrant structure. In Waterfall Cove (2020-21), the orientation looks like it is vertical; two sets of dark brown rocks, on either side of a light blue stream of water mass, in a way highly reminiscent of classical Chinese painting. Cyphers’ feeling for nature is particularly impressive, it traces her roots from the cliffs of the Chesapeake Bay, New York City’s cavernous skyscrapers, to ponds and waterfalls in upstate NY. Whatever the reason for the artist’s focus on geological structures, water and sky, the forms stay vibrantly alive, assuming a life of their own. We forget that she borrows from paintings made more than a thousand years ago. The forms become abstract, which contemporises them. Small trees on the other edge of the rocks further directs the painting toward both Asian and Hudson River School influences.

Installation view, Peggy Cyphers at Front Room Gallery.

In Rivers and Clouds (2015-22), Cyphers does a great job of portraying overhanging cliffs in gray and black, while the blue and white sky or river takes up a smallish vertical space on the lower end of the painting. The rocks, which might also be very dark clouds, consist of repetitive patterns that feel, again, like a Chinese inspired brushwork that coalesce into something vaguely recognizable. 

Given Cyphers’ ability to internalize features of Asian painting, but at the same time use those features in ways that advance an international and Western esthetic, we can only surmise her intentions. But this is probably why the paintings works so well–they quote without using the imagery traditionally. It can be hard to make sense, sometimes, of the paintings’ upside-down structure. But the difficulty enables the artist to move in any direction–past, present, or future. Cyphers is an original, and so independent, her art successfully seamlessly engages her enthusiasms. WM