[...] Then, back to the S.U.V. for a short ride to Andrew Edlin, on Bowery, a space that shares Donnelly’s taste for self-taught artists.
The main room at Edlin displayed a suite of loose, abstract hairballs drawn by Dan Miller, an artist from the Creative Growth art center in Oakland, Calif., whom KAWS collects. But the real gems, he said, were in the gallery’s back room: a handful of paintings by the self-taught artist Abraham Lincoln Walker (1921-1993), who lived in East St. Louis, Ill., that Edlin had set aside. (The artist’s works are priced from $10,000 to $30,000.)
On each of the panels, phantasmic faces and figures emerge from thin squidges of deep but chalky earth tones, teals and aubergines. These examples didn’t have the vibrancy of the pictures Donnelly pulled up on his phone. There was, though, an intense little painting by Joe Coleman, now in his 60s, an underground illustrator known for crisp but macabre portraits covered in narrative text, laid down with a brush one bristle wide. The dealer must know his client: Three Coleman works are part of Donnelly’s Drawing Center show.
- Travis Diehl