GRACE GLUECK: The New York Times: Friday September 24, 1982

“Gallery Artists’ Choice” (Gruenebaum Gallery, 38 East 57th Street):  The 13 artists in the Gruenebaum gallery’s stable, by and large of the Abstract Expressionist persuasion, were each asked to choose the work of a younger artist for exhibition.  The selections take on more interest, of  course, if you know the work of the older artists, and it’s too bad that space didn’t permit its inclusion.

For the most part, though, the older artists don’t really surprise us with their choices.  James Brooks, known for lyrical abstractions packed with big, jostling forms, has picked James Bohary, whose two totally abstract canvases are color-drenched fields of impasto stroking- raw, juicy work of a kind that by now seems very tame.  Slightly more piquant are Pat Passlof’s two smaller works, also dense with paint strokings but giving the color a little more structure.  (She was chose by that fiery impasto impresario, Milton Resnick.)  Giorgio Cavalon, a quiet, contemplative painter in whose own luminous canvases color resonates from geometric shapes, elected Manuela Filiaci, and Italian-born artist.  She contributes a single and quite interesting abstraction, in which a big feathered slash of maroon red zips diagonally across a delicately painted, very old-masterish gold ground.

Other nice picks include a canvas by Hermine Ford (chosen by Janice Biala, another eloquent colorist), almost wholly occupied by a big, painterly green field lightened by reedlike lines of pale greens and reds; two understated still lifes by David Frazer, very involved with the play of light on surfaces (chosen by Sonia Gechtoff, herself noted for light-and-shadow renditions), and Derek Lynch’s two abstractions in which fields of agitated brushstrokes are bound together by lashing swirls of line.  Mr. Lynch’s sponsor is the very gestural painter, John Seery.  One of the few surprises is Karen Gunderson’s eerie, carefully rendered paintings of foreboding cloud formations, chosen by that master of lyrical color structure, Esteban Vicente.  But on the whole, there’s not much excitement here.