In the intimate Upper West Side apartment where Florine Stettheimer and her sisters hosted their legendary salon from 1915 to 1935, Allison Wade, an artist and salonniere, shows the work of a painter who similarly channels the spirits of modernist women. Gualdoni stains the backs of her canvases with patterns borrowed from geometric abstractions by Sonia Delaunay and Stepanova Varvara, both of whom straddled the fields of textile design and fine art. Her completed compositions alternate ethereal interiors with still-lifes of plants. In one small, moody picture, a vase holds stalks of flowering nightshade. The largest painting, a tricky patchwork of textures, is a cropped view of a bedroom, illuminated by a pyramid of lamplight, with a delicately rendered harvest of plants running beneath a bed and a table like an apparitional herbarium.
-- Johanna Fateman