In Newman's fluid, unstable images, nothing is defined but all things are suggested. Her biomorphic abstractions in a sensual palette of flesh and earth tones make us aware of the desire to name and possess implicit in all acts of seeing. In the catalog essay, Jean Fisher considers the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Last Year at Marienbad, and the Lascaux cave paintings in order to investigate the way Newman's painting/drawings negotiate the "labyrinthine recesses of consciousness and its representations."

1987, 32 pp., 5 color, 10 b/w illus., paperback

Related exhibition: Avis Newman, Lassitude Before Words (1988)