The poker-faced satires of David Shrigley, the cartoon expressionism of Ellen Berkenblit and the multihued yarn geometrics of Jim Lambie together make for a vibrant and provocative new show at the Winter Street Gallery in Edgartown.
Mr. Shrigley’s neon installation Exibition, intentionally misspelled in glowing green letters, titles the three-way show, which closes Oct. 31 as the gallery concludes its sophomore summer.
Needling the art world with willfully bad spelling again, the British artist’s drawing of a small, anxious figure peering out from a wall of empty cubes is captioned I Remain Unsold Despite Being Competatively Priced.
Among other targets, Mr. Shrigley takes aim at advertising, Superman, vampires and bucket lists in his untitled, poster-like works, pairing childlike, black-on-white images with unsettling phrases lettered in all caps.
Ms. Berkenblit’s cartoon-like profiles of an orange tiger and a pop-eyed woman are familar motifs for the American abstract expressionist, whose work has been collected by the Brooklyn Museum.
Versions of the woman appear in three of Ms. Berkenblit’s oils at the gallery, each profile more tightly cropped than the next — a choice that heightens the sense of urgency as the figures progress from tight-lipped (Cosmology, 2020) to wide-mouthed (Fireman’s Carnival, 2019) to, finally, a scream so visually loud that the bottom jaw has dropped out of the frame (Luridia, 2019).
The tiger’s mouth is also open wide in Ms. Berkenblit’s untitled gouache and graphite from 2018. But its eyes are mere dots, lending the creature a bland and friendly look as it plods past a multicolored tractor-trailer headed the other way on a nighttime highway.
The show’s sole work by Mr. Lambie offers a fully abstract moment amid the images and words.
Wool Painting (Reverberation), from 2021, is a small-scale, wall-hung version of the psychedelic Zobop installations that made the Scottish artist’s name starting in 1999.
In those larger works, which helped land him on the short list for the Tate Gallery’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2005, Mr. Lambie used parallel lines of colored vinyl tape to cover entire gallery floors. The Zobop name, he said, was a tribute to bebop jazz.
In Wool Painting (Reverberation), Mr. Lambie has laminated colorful filaments of yarn in horizontal, vertical and diagonal bands across a 20” by 16” canvas. The effect is rhythmic and quietly dazzling.
Exibition concludes a busy second summer at the gallery, according to owners Ingrid Lundgren and George Newall.
“It flew by,” Ms. Lundgren said Friday during the opening reception for the show. Four interns found their way to the gallery for summer experience, she said, and word of mouth brought visiting art collectors from Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and Mexico City.
Also this year, the couple launched their publishing imprint Winter Street Books with a monograph of drawings by Canadian artist Anna Weyant.
While they’ll be closing after Oct. 31, Mr. Newall and Ms. Lundgren have not ruled out a potential pop-up around the holidays, they said.
Winter Street Gallery is located at 22 Winter street and online at winterstreetgallery.com.
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