June 1984

Group at Escondida

Galeria Escondida opened its doors last month in Taos with a group show designed to suit a wide range of tastes. Berje Barrow exhibited very pleasant and calm weavings in lovely earth tones, while Margaret Nes displayed pastels of bold New Mexico buildings and sensuous flowers which show more than a passing debt to O’Keeffe. Her landscapes, a la Marsden Hartley, are brooding. Nes’s strong color sense will come in handy when she finds her own voice.

The punch in the show was delivered by Hester Simpson’s series, Commemorative for Red Annette. Combining precise, almost cartographic mark-making with swift, calligraphic expressionism, she has recorded a sincere search for the meaning of the death of a friend, and created a graphic description of a wordless emotional landscape.