IT TOOK A FRACTION of a second for the smile of happiness on my face to freeze and an icy chill to seize me when, beginning of February, I opened an email from the Zürcher Gallery announcing an exhibition by Lynn Umlauf. Under her name were the dates 1942–2022. Lynn had passed on February 2 in her New York home/studio on the Bowery, and I had not seen her since the damned pandemic began. Almost two years! The pang of regret is acute, still.Rendered all the more poignant by her absence, the exhibition brings together paintings from the ’70s and a number of small, incredibly intense, at once tender