Galleries: Meticulous and abstract, they're back on the scene

Just when you think there's no future for the kind of slow, sincere, painstakingly realized abstract painting that used to be ubiquitous in galleries, it shows up almost everywhere.

Last month, Vivian Wolovitz's brooding, abstract interpretations of views from her house lent an unfamiliar gravitas to the rooms of Projects Gallery in Northern Liberties. This month, at Old City's Rosenfeld Gallery, Lisa Pressman and Sara Mast, two prolific painters who work in encaustic (the medium of pigment and heated beeswax that requires a certain patience of its users) conjure landscapes of personal experience and the solar system respectively in two solo shows.

Pressman, based in West Orange, N.J., creates paintings that are simultaneously lyrical and glacial: The open spaces in her oil and encaustic works are intersected by thin swirling lines suggestive of tornadoes, but also by thick, clotted ones that bring to mind chain links and rivers.

Pressman clearly loves to paint, but she doodles too much in many of her works. The strongest paintings in her show are the least busy, least atmospheric ones, among them her eccentric Edge of the World, in which two vast areas are separated by a an irregular chain of open shapes that looks like a rocky coast.

Constellations and galaxies inspire Mast, who lives in Bozeman, Mont., and presumably sees more of them than the rest of us do, but her paintings bring 1950s New York School abstraction to mind, too. Mast's layers of encaustic hint at the passage of time - the etch marks embedded in her waxy, milky layers made me think of the Nazca lines of Peru - while her outermost droplets of encaustic read simultaneously as molecules, stars, and Pollock-like drips.

One block west, at Trust Gallery, Juri Kim has a one-person show of abstract paintings made between 2005 and the present, all composed of thousands of dots of acrylic paint. Kim, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, and lives in Philadelphia, thinks of her process as a form of communication and has used elements of the braille alphabet, color-blindness tests, American Sign Language, and the Rorschach test in her compositions. Her recent work, which takes her ideas to their logical extreme - the paintings seem to pulse messages like digital signs - was relegated to the low-ceilinged second floor of the building; it should have had the ground floor.

In Center City, "Beyond Abstraction," a group exhibition of eight artists organized by the independent curator Katrin Elia for the Center for Emerging Visual Artists features earthy, hard-won abstract paintings by Alan Soffer, Antonio Puri, Larry Spaid, and Brian Dickerson.

"Wall Space," the latest exhibition for the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center's gallery, marks yet another inspired gathering of talent here, this time of the efforts of eight artists who transcend easy categorization.

Among my favorite pieces were Virgil Marti's two large, silver-painted, ornately cut plywood shapes that hang on the wall and look like melting mirrors; Daniel Gordon's bizarre photographic collages; Christian Boltanski's sculpture composed of photographs and electrical components; and Julie Weitz's hyperreal gouache portraits of people in knitted head masks.