Show delivers Margaret Via's spare, expressive work

The Margaret Via retrospective now at Maude Kerns Art Center provides a slightly scattered look at an accomplished 20th century artist who's lived in the Eugene area for a quarter century. Via (the name rhymes with EYE-uh) came of age artistically in the world of abstract expressionism, the mid-20th-century movement that divorced artistic content from its component lines, shapes, forms and colors, then discarded the content and served up the rest. One of her early teachers, in fact, was Hans Hofmann, a seminal figure in the New York School. Though not as well known as the younger abstract expressionists, Hofmann exerted a profound influence on them, especially on Jackson Pollock.

Via's work, which fills all the gallery space at Maude Kerns, isn't quite that unrestrained. It ranges from simple pencil or ink sketches to finished oil paintings and includes landscapes, cityscapes, human figures and pure abstraction. In fact, the range of the show is a little bewildering, making it difficult in a brief visit to tie all the various pieces together artistically. But Via is at her best as an analytical observer of landscape, tweaking the forms and textures into spare and exciting calligraphic outbursts. She coaxes a great deal out of very little, visually speaking.

"Above the Expressway," a 1987 ink drawing, details a landscape in the barest minimum of black lines, distilling the world to a Picassolike essence. But Via doesn't just settle for simple purity; her drawing seems to vibrate like a nervous cat. This charged simplicity recurs in a number of her other works. ``Fir Trees III,'' an ink drawing made in 2000, is a wonderfully perfect little abstract drawing. ``Snow Garden II'' - not to mention ``Snow Garden I'' - is nothing more than a shimmer of reality, and thus wonderfully satisfying.

My own favorite in the show is ``Goshen Factory,'' a 1981 pen-and-ink work that brings the same simple, almost mystical approach to the industrial landscape around Eugene and captures its essence in the quickest and easiest gesture imaginable.

Via's greatest works are not in the show, at least not in their original form. In 1977 she created a huge abstract outdoor mural on a building in Atlanta. Carefully designed to play with the odd and fractured urban space for which it was commissioned, the mural combines simple lines and colored shapes in what must have been a surprise for more than a few urban Georgians. The mural itself, though, is long gone, as is another she did in Beaverton.

Maude Kerns has re-created the Georgia mural, to scale, on two walls of a gallery, and has a short video of Via commenting on the work. "It's destroyed," her voice says of the Beaverton project. "As is the thing in Atlanta, destroyed. So the big things I've done in my life are no longer around." But they are still around, at least in a small way, until this show closes.

May 2, 2004