Contributed by Julian Kreimer/ At 3:10 pm on a blustery Thursday afternoon, the falling sun refracted off the 3rd floor windows of PS 42, the Benjamin Altman Elementary School, named for the department store magnate, a first-generation son of Bavarian Jews who rose from running a small Lower East Side dry-goods store to opening one of … read more… “On a Cartoon Graveyard”
The Daily
Contributed by Sharon Butler \ I was recently invited to select work from an Open Call at the Ely Center for Contemporary Art in New Haven. Looking at more than 300 worthy submissions (and reading all the artist statements) I was drawn to work that’s rooted in materiality, ritual, and the structure of daily life. … read more… “The Daily”
Steve Hicks: Sparring shape and line
Contributed by Carol Diamond / Steve Hicks’s oil and acrylic canvases exude confidence and exuberance, like a teenager sporting a new outfit and venturing out to face the world. I’ve got this, the paintings seem to say. Hicks’s shapes and lines, his layers and hues, impart a robust, jaunty sense of speed and physicality. For all … read more… “Steve Hicks: Sparring shape and line”
Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: January 2020
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Wake up everyone, the holidays are over! Get back to work! Go out and see some shows! This month, despite the unseasonably warm temperatures, a few galleries seem to be on winter hiatus, but we have plenty of options nonetheless. Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper, Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater, … read more… “Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: January 2020”
Kathryn Hart: A feminist in Venice
Contributed by Emma Stolarski / Kathryn Hart’s “New Dawn,” an inventive site-specific exhibition of sculpture and photography, contemplates the simultaneous organic processes of generation, regeneration, degradation, and, finally, documentation. Each wire-and-fiberglass sculpture incorporates the tension between becoming and eroding, renewal and entropy, growth and decay. The pieces glisten with an embryonic presence and almost seem … read more… “Kathryn Hart: A feminist in Venice”
Art and Film: 2019 Top Ten
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It’s been a fine year for movies, their demise due to streaming having been greatly exaggerated notwithstanding awkward episodes like the theatrical release of Netflix-backed The Irishman. Here is my inexorably subjective and eminently debatable list of the Top Ten dramatic films of 2019. The Irishman. Still the king of the … read more… “Art and Film: 2019 Top Ten”
Richard Tuttle sees the light
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Richard Tuttle, who has lived in New Mexico since the late 1980s, recently got an expansive new studio on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Exchanging mesa views for a perch on the ocean, at the very edge of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown, places him physically … read more… “Richard Tuttle sees the light”
Allison Schulnik’s glamour magic and illusion
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Moths are weird and macabre. Allison Schulnik, in her animated short MOTH in “Suffering From Realness” at Mass MoCA, fully captures their gothic elegance. The moths rhythmically fan eyespots and morph into something new and magical every few seconds, conjuring a resonant line from Mary Oliver’s poem, Sleeping in the Forest: “By morning I had vanished at … read more… “Allison Schulnik’s glamour magic and illusion”
Susanna Coffey: A life in the studio
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / In 2015 Susanna Coffey saw “In the Studio: Paintings,” an exhibition of canvases from the 1600s to the present that John Elderfield curated at Gagosian. Susanna was struck by the fact that the exhibition only included three paintings of women, and so she decided to make a series that focuses … read more… “Susanna Coffey: A life in the studio”
David Diao’s challenge to formalism
Contributed by Adam Simon / The space between 0 and 1 is infinite. I thought of this in relation to David Diao’s exhibition, “Studios and Sales,” currently at Postmasters. The show is an inspired pairing of two works, Studios, Updated and Sales. Sales is an arrangement of twenty-five smallish paintings from 1992 that documents Diao’s painting sales between 1968 … read more… “David Diao’s challenge to formalism”