Liza Bingham reviews the exhibition The Matter that Surrounds Us: Wols and Charline von Heyl at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, on view through June 8, 2014.

Bingham writes that the show "brings together two German painters, one a 20th century maverick-visionary, the other a contemporary art star. The point of connection between the two painters is Wols’s Blue Phantom (1959); the first oil painting von Heyl recalls seeing as a child. In her accompanying catalogue essay, Siegel notes the artists’ shared rejection of traditional painting categories, such as abstraction, representation and expressionism. Their common interest in imagery that is by turns namable, then less so, acts as a visual thread bridging the intergenerational paintings."