Kate Oh’s Endless knot is an exemplary group exhibition that collates traditional, folk art with more contemporary approaches that range from pattern-based abstraction to figuration. The exhibition is curated by Tibetan artist, Pema Rinzin, a mainstay at Kate Oh whose group exhibitions continue to impress. There is no one thorough-going motif but myriad approaches, threaded together by several connective tissues and leitmotifs.

There are a number of cross-currents that carry us from work to work. For example, Khenzom’s Dawa’s moon draws on the Tibetan folk tradition and symbolism, presenting the eponymous framed moon before a staid figure. Jenia Weischsel’s Paul also draws on the figurative mode, depicting a Balthus-like portrait. Anay Ngawang Chodak and Yangdzom Lama’s oil on wood The voluptuous tree, on the other hand, render their figures in much more fragmented, parceled terms. Chodak’s Seeing all in its true forms features a peach-figured glowing red face, which serves as an apt match to the tangerine palettes deployed by Margaret Sabrina Groton’s Alien within and Sonam Norbu Namsel diptych, Sonam Norbu Namsel witness, both of which fragment scenes in vivid glowing terms. In the latter work, the wolf-like shadow exchanges foreground for background. All of these works engage with fragments of bodily features. Others, like Tsultrim Tenzin, draw on the still life genre in a more straightforward fashion, demonstrating pure painterly dexterity and a command of verisimilitude.

Sarah Ingraham, on the other hand, engages the nature morte genre, in a Jonas Wood-like approach with delineated flaxen sunflowers and minute green apples at the base. Photographer Michel Nafziger’s ghostly, ethereal portrait of a woman again evidences that one of the connective tissues in this show is the portraiture genre. We also see this in Ekin Balcioglu excellent painting of a shimmering, thickly painted fish, marked by soft Cubist touch.

Kate Oh’s pattern-based Dancheong in knots is, as is to be expected from the artist, a demonstration of the rapprochement of traditional, pattern-based Korean symbolism and more modern, post-painterly abstraction-based geometrical recursion. The work invites optical lingering and wandering, as does Pema Kongpo’s Snow lion eyes, a work that, as the title suggests, presents a sea of lash-raked eyeballs painted in a lovely carmine. Horizakura’s circumscribed dragon, rife with detailed pink scales, curls into itself as tufts wave and fog at the edges; this work, too, is masterfully executed. Jackie Hoving’s In knots, again, returns us to portraiture, fracturing her subject with bisecting, variegated lines and select aquamarine elements. Kate Kulish’ The leopard also uses a collage-like tapestry of varicolored, semi- geometrical visual elements that traipse between the recesses of legibility.

Lauren Kolesinskas pools two sets of rose-pink arms into an inky sea while, in the picture plane’s boundaries, a purple cape flags in the upper-right corner; the scene is enigmatic, with a desiccated bone connecting the outstretched arms, one pair pulling the other up from the wading pool. Again, anaomtical elements are presented in fragmented form. Natsu’s Path to the sun, View from Central Park, executed with Sumi-ink, Japanese mineral pigments, and nikawa on Kumohada mashi paper, dissolves into repetition, a mosaic of colored, splotched elements, each cascading into itself like a charred kaleidoscopic sea. Repetition is another connective tissue, which returns in Tantric Recursion, an anthropomorphic tiger fit with a third eye prowling before a mirror-like object’s recursive patterns. We find such patterning in Irina Rodnikoff’s cross- hatched lineal latticework, which, like Moholy-Nagy’s pattern-making, turns the constructivist cross along its internal axes. Kevin Connolly Gillespie’s Yots also makes use of animals sliding into patterns, this time a snake wavering into knots along the window-folds of an angular, six- pointed matrix; the subtending pattern shares much with Alexander Deschamps’ Chasing the dragon, which, again, proposes the traditional dragon motif (though only the head) sealed across a similar pattern, plotted in the center. The work’s enigmatic construction suggestion movement within the vibrating crimson trellis. Tashi Mannox’s Plump abundance of Tendrel also draws on such traditional, winding motifs, this one slickly slipping into cycloidal discs, reminiscent of enso circles.

Laetitia Guyon’s Hidden realms, a curious landscape-like construction, coalesces waving blue ripples across peaks of yellow and orange dunes. The work is one of the few landscapes, though it does not take on the genre in traditional terms. Pia Leighton and Shamona Stokes’s Wonder worker both present winged heavenly figures, with the latter’s glazed ceramic piece being one of the select sculptures in the show; the work figures a celestial figure, an amalgamation of a winged bear and ritual Venus. Jongseung Lee centers a rectangular pink strip before corrosive layers of tattered purple and cerulean; the skeins are interrupted in the corners by amber-copper trickles. The pattern is meted out by a glowing plum rectangle, marked by Stygian dart-rips. Curator Pema Rinzin also includes one of their classic works, Cloud cosmos light blue, where wisps and tuffets warp into one another; the artist, throughout their Peace and energy and Water series, has made inventive, affecting use of these static, frothing wisps.

Zelina Tenzindegi Reissinger's textile tapestry also returns to the pattern-based cascade, a thin square lime thread centering the dripping moss threads-cum-strokes. Florencia Sanchez’s skeletal figures return to traditional motifs, the haunting scene staging a proscenium upon which beaming duo jig. Rabkar Wangchuk, a Tibetan Thang-ka painter from Dharamsala, draws from their studies in Tibetan Buddhism but renders the semblance modern—and even Pop-influenced. On the one hand are traditional motifs while, to the right edge of the painting, a Mickey Mouse figure sits above a window-portal to the outer world. This work, one of my favorites, recalls Ronnie Cutrone’s appropriations, though the scene is more complex than much of Cutrone’s oeuvre. It is also a metonym for the show, itself, which dovetails mixed approaches to leitmotifs novel and traditional.

Ekin Erkan is a philosopher and art history researcher whose writing has appeared in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Philosophia, and the Journal of Value Inquiry, amongst other venues. Erkan also is an art critic who contributes to the Brooklyn Rail.