April in the city, and a person's thoughts turn to...all the incredible museum and gallery shows that are going up, coming down, and vying for your attention during a season of artful heavy-hitters.

Among these is 20x200 artist Valerie Hegarty, whose show Cosmic Collisions is on view through the rest of this week at the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

Installation view of Cosmic Collisions by Valerie Hegarty at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Known for her installations' penchant for literally re-imagining and/or taking over a gallery space ("kudzulike" according to the NYT), this show may seem a little tame by comparison, a little tidier. For Cosmic Collisions, Hegarty departs from familiar terrain of reinterpreting 19th century classic landscape painting and instead focuses her attention on the titans of Abstract, Conceptual and Minimalist art. From the press release:

For this exhibition, Hegarty expands her dialogue between American master paintings and catalytic events by drawing upon a broad range of influences to include the sublime, quantum physics, alchemy, origami, abstract expressionism and imagery produced from the Hubble telescope. As in works past, Hegarty reconfigures the paradigms of American painting through interventions that appear to be the result of natural events. With works that recall Rothko, LeWitt and Pollock, Cosmic Collisions pushes the parameters of such events, to suggest the effects of the quantum mechanics of space on these iconic works, creating almost petrified relics.

Starry Rothko by Valerie Hegarty

Creating facsimiles of Sol Le Witt's Open Cubes, or a Rothko canvas, or an action-painting by Jackson Pollock, Hegarty has warped, singed, and otherwise treated these pieces as world-weary travelers through the space/time continuum, and lay the results before us. Reviewed this week in both the New Yorker ("It's like an episode of the Twilight Zone as scripted by Fontana, Manzoni and Klein.") and the New York Times ("Some of Ms. Hegarty’s transformations suggest natural disasters; others conjure nuclear explosions"), Hegarty proves herself as an artist willing to take on new risks and challenges and to work beyond a proven and historically successful comfort zone.

In addition to her work at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Valerie's work can be seen in a few places in-person and online. First, her work is installed at out of doors on The Highline. Next, we still also have some medium sized prints of her 20x200 edition First Harvest in the Wilderness with Pileated Woodpecker for sale, the proceeds of which benefit the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Valerie Hegarty's Cosmic Collisions
On view through April 11, 2010
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
21 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002