Los Angeles Times: Art Reviews
March 9,1996
Susan Kandel (Special to the Times)

Stain Painting

In a single blow, Didi Dunphy makes gorgeous tie-dye fabrics and gives Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis a run for their money.

What's the; difference, anyway, between the narcotic pleasures of the 1960s craft par excellence and the snoozy palatability of Colorfield stain painting Nothing much‹besides status, dollar value and museum validation.

The same could be said for the differences between Colonial quilt making and so-called "systemic abstraction," yet another brand of 1960s formalism. Dunphy's deadpan quilt paintings, patched together from hundreds of tiny squares and triangles of painted canvas. suggest that the same, obsessive-compulsive impulse lies behind the cozy, "feminine" craft and the coolly intellectual, "masculine" art.

These large-scale works at A/B Gallery are intricately laced with pupil-popping color and sharply honed irony. But to consider them solely within the context of postmodern critique, parody or subversion is to miss the point.

Dunphy's paintings are merely dressed up for the occasion as flippant, knowing gestures. Like artist Jim Isermann, she has undertaken a labor of love, a plea for beauty.

Yet the stakes are entirely different. The myriad seductions of beauty, tangled up with questions of respect and respectability, are particularly problematic for women in this culture. Dunphy's answer is to take herself and those seductions very seriously and to entice us into doing the same.