These 10 pieces astound at the 10th Masters Exhibit at Sager Reeves Gallery

Artworks whisper, hum, sometimes even shout from the walls of Sager Reeves Gallery.

Together, they offer individual testimonies — and form a greater one, of marks and meaning made through the 20th century's shifting times. On display, as it has been in some fashion for each of the past 10 Decembers, the Masters Exhibit upholds masters of all sorts, as the gallery's website notes, from those not fully recognized in their time to top-of-mind names whose catalogues deserve closer attention.

"Our 10th Masters Exhibit reaches back through the movements of recent art history that we’ve explored in previous exhibits, with reminders of how mastery itself has taken shape in the past 100 years," the gallery notes.

And these shapes, assumed and created, are wondrous and diverse.

"Abstractionists paved the way for artists to compose and express without pictures; surrealists wielded the power of imagined and dreamt scenes to reveal the human psyche; expressionists used their very marks to convey energy and feeling and guide an emotional experience for the viewer," the gallery statement says.

Of course, every piece here proves worthy of the Masters label, bearing their own remarkable touches: the way black and white attract and repel in Nicolas Carone's "Untitled"; the ever-present wildness of Salvador Dali's "The Face in the Windmill"; the spare glories of Perle Fine's "Weathervane," still among my favorite pieces ever to hang at Sager Reeves; and the vitality transferred through a number of works by late local legend Ben Cameron.

But these 10 pieces especially moved me on a recent afternoon visit to the gallery.

1. Norman Bluhm's blues

The Chicago native's work astounds throughout the exhibit, but there is something special to the fathomless blue Bluhm paints in "Sweet Sue." The color seems to bisect the composition, then swirl round the northern edge of the frame before bleeding through its southern analogue.

2. Witnessing Leonora Carrington's hand at work

Birds, snakes and ghost-like creatures in Leonora Carrington's work read like excerpts from some illustrated apocrypha. But, as the Masters Exhibit is prone to do, the gallery displays her hand at work in quite another way. Intimacy attends the framed letter, scrawled out on the stationery of a Mexican hotel, perched beside her inked creations.

3 and 4. Marc Chagall's works of biblical proportion

Chagall's biblical scenes prove visually intoxicating enough to rearrange one's internal creeds.

His "Crucifixion" moves a gaunt, blue moon-faced Christ to the periphery, almost crowded from the frame. From there, he surveys modern trappings arising in his absence, ghosts of his own, beloved created things whirling about him, and his virgin mother gazing downcast in both reverence and horror before her dying love.

"Job in Prayer" captures another martyr, bearing a wise man's beard and alien skin, his mouth hanging open in both silence and protest somehow.

5. Helen DeMott's red

Again, as with Bluhm, there is no reducing an artist like DeMott to a single color. But the subtly-shifting shades in her "Composition Red" lend definition and dimension to the titular tone.

6. Perle Fine's "Untitled"

When people lob tired phrases like "My kid could do that" at abstract art, they think they're making profound statements about pieces like Fine's graphite-on-paper creation. Certainly, it bears a "scribbled" quality. But to let your eye wander the composition is to see in the lines and collisions — and areas of quieter, lighter mark-making — a freedom and intention few hands, of any age, could produce. Fine's piece truly sings.

7. The Fini wall

One wall in this year's exhibit best articulates what the past 10 years have meant to Columbia viewers. Gallery owners Joel Sager, Hannah Reeves and their co-laborers wish to bring artists close and grant them a measure of what they're due. Among the artists they've consistently championed is Leonor Fini, the Buenos Aires-born talent. To my shame, I knew almost nothing of Fini before the Masters Exhibit began, but have come to treasure her oeuvre.

Fini emerges throughout the exhibit, but along one wall the gallery groups a striking array of small portraits — of architects and travelers and mystics. The work's tenderness, rendered on Japanese paper, balances the resolute expressions of Fini's subjects with a certain fragility. To sit or stand before them is to take in what this exhibit truly has been about.

8. Fini's "Untitled (Crowned)"

Seen along another wall, words cannot justly describe this piece; a sensual and sacred geometry fills the rounded frame, making it impossible — undesirable, even — to look away.

9. Picasso on a platter

Great gentleness marks Pablo Picasso's ceramic "Colombe sur Lit de Paille (2nd version of Ramie 79)." Across his platter, golden — almost divine — feathers peek through the jacket of an otherwise mottled bird. Hovering above nest fragments, the feathered friend feels assured yet aware of its delicate creatureliness.

10. Donald Rohels, "Ohio Garden Lynx"

Gorgeous and vibrant, yet with a light touch, Rohels' lithograph is an exemplary work of abstract representation. The artist suggests a variety of natural forms while conveying his subjects through gesture and essence.

The Masters Exhibit runs through Jan. 27. Visit https://sagerreevesgallery.com/exhibits/2023-masters-exhibit/ for more information.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 10 moving pieces from the 10th Masters Exhibit at Sager Reeves Gallery