Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 18, 2024
If you find yourself in Terminal 7 at the Los Angeles International Airport, you can’t miss Timothy Nolan’s new public art project, a series of� large-scale prints, made from collages that incorporate images of maps, galaxies, and other ephemera from the days when we looked things up in encyclopedias and […]
Todd James, “TBC,” 2011, gouache and graphite on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 inches. Images courtesy Paul Kasmin. “Pretty on the Inside,” an anxiety-provoking group show of figurative work at Paul Kasmin, will make you forget the ennui of contemporary abstraction. Todd James‘s eye-popping gouaches, fusing cartooning and a seventies […]
“And Half,” 1959 “Back and Front,” 1960 “Play,” 1960 “Epigram,” 1961 “Galore,” 1966 “Interlock Color,” 1973 “Verdancy,” 1981 “Refresh,” 1999 Roberta Smith blogs at Arts Beat that Kenneth Noland, who painted some of the great emblems of the postwar American abstract style called Color Field painting, died Tuesday at […]
Welcome to the April edition of the Two Coats painting-centric guide to art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We’ll be updating next week, so if you have shows opening in the middle or at the end of the month, and you want us to consider them for inclusion, shoot us a note at staff@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put “NYC Guide” in the subject line.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon – the ballyhooed simultaneous release of Oppenheimer and Barbie, two expensive and well-acted films with sophisticated political messages rendered by leading auteurs – afforded 2023 the façade of audacity. But they came out during the writers’ strike, which signaled, if somewhat below the radar trained on the films, the uneasy and uncertain relationship between streaming and Hollywood.
Welcome to the March edition of the only painting-centric guide to art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We’ll be updating next week, so if you have shows opening in the middle or at the end of the month, and you want us to consider them for inclusion, shoot us a note at staff@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put “NYC Guide” in the subject line.
Contributed by David Carrier / What comes after Abstract Expressionism? A couple of generations ago, American art writers were intent on addressing that question. The American color field art of Morris Louis, Kenneth Nolan and Jules Olitski was one plausible answer. Then, of course, came Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and much more. The French had a different answer. They were interested in the abstraction of Hungarian-born Simon Hantaï (1922–2008), who moved to France in 1948 and whose work seemed in line with the post-structuralist theory that had taken hold there. His inspirations were Marxism, Catholic tradition, Matisse, Picasso, and Jackson Pollock as seen in Paris exhibitions, and his bête noire was Surrealism. Given these rich and disparate interests and impulses, it goes almost without saying that Hantaï developed a highly distinctive aesthetic. Long famous in France, his paintings recently have been shown in several ambitious Manhattan galleries, notably Timothy Taylor.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Last week, “La Banda 2024” opened at Tapetto Volante, a gallery tucked into a group of Gowanus studio spaces, currently inhabited by artists Inna Babaeva and Lenora Loeb. The show features work by many of the stalwart artist-organizers in Brooklyn’s art community, who keep the outer-borough art conversation percolating despite the relative inattention of mainstream media that focus more on Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Tribeca.
This month, make sure to double-check gallery addresses because some have changed locations. James Fuentes, Asya Geisberg, and Alexander Gray are moving to Tribeca. Almine Rech and Jack Shainman are down there, too. Nathalie Karg has moved to Elizabeth Street, and Kathryn Markel has a second location in Chelsea on Tenth Avenue. Head to the East Village for “Truth Be Told,” Kyle Staver’s solo at Half Gallery. We also recommend a trip to Henry Street, where all the small spaces are killing it. In Brooklyn, don’t miss “La Banda 2024,” which opens tonight at Tappeto Volante. Organized by Paola Gallio, this big small-work show features a slew of notable artists who want to support a formidable artist-run space. Note to adventurous art collectors: You won’t be disappointed.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In Haskell Wexler’s iconic 1969 counterculture film Medium Cool, John Cassellis, a cold-eyed TV photojournalist, has internalized the notion of television as a “cool” medium in the McLuhan-esque sense of requiring viewers to search for context in order to understand what they are seeing. When covering the shockingly violent 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, though, he finds it increasingly hard to stay objectively aloof. If Cassellis succumbs to passion, Andy Meerow finds a more nuanced solution in the realm of painting – also a relatively cool medium – manifested in his gratifyingly quizzical work in “Slanted Andy” at Derosia. Meerow doesn’t either opt out or surrender; he just takes a sidelong view.
