It's hard to say which is more impressive: The renovation of Bridgette Mayer Gallery, which has turned the former parlor floor and cellar beneath it into sleek, muted, minimalist spaces while retaining some of their 18th-century features, or the sprawling, colorful group show of mainly abstract paintings celebrating that transformation. But there's no question that the latter, "Karmic Abstraction," inhabits the gallery's new and improved quarters as if designed to test their architectural refinements.
The show's theme - that all contemporary abstract painting embodies or reflects on the history of art - is fleshed out successfully in most of the works in this 16-artist exhibition, starting with the first paintings you see in the front room. They are Thomas Nozkowski's handsome untitled oil painting of solid forms, reminiscent of late Guston paintings and Brancusi's sculpture The Kiss; and Odili Donald Odita's Electric City, a huge acrylic of angular, vertical geometric shapes in a composition that seems equally informed by color-field painting, op-art, and art deco art and architecture, but also by African art (Odili grew up in the American Midwest but was born in Nigeria). The two monochromatic phthalo-blue paintings with punctured surfaces by Los Angeles artist Joe Goode look wonderful in their close proximity to Nozkowski and Odita.