Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Coinciding with their individual solo exhibitions at Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art and Gold Montclair that involve sports imagery and content, I invited Two Coats contributor Zach Seeger to talk to Terry Rosenberg about his practice and current exhibition. This is the exchange that took place.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Not many good contemporary painters fully embrace sports. The subject is burdened by daunting precedent (George Bellows) and mild cliché (Leroy Neiman). But this century, as social media have enabled athletes to reveal and fans to probe the people behind and beyond the moves, sports have acquired greater social and political resonance, sending a stronger demand signal to artists.
I asked Zach Seeger, artist�and co-director of This Friday Or Next Friday, a small gallery space in DUMBO, why he paints eyes. “I began painting the eye paintings following a series of collages that were inspired by the threat (real or imagined) of an all formatting eye: the eye of […]
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Freight + Volume’s vaulted Tribeca showroom is the perfect amalgam of its previous spaces in Chelsea and the Lower East Side: a charming and spacious boutique, ideally suited to paintings. Jared Deery’s tightly curated solo show “A Liminal Light”, includes large, portrait-oriented canvases featuring magic-marker-inspired motifs of drips, loops, blobs, and streaks that conjure still-life flowers and their imagined domains. In entering the gallery, they appear as natural and seamless as a screensaver at an internet cafe waiting for a patron to connect to Netscape. They are simultaneously retro and futuristic, borrowing from 1990s cyberpunk and catapulting its very obsolescence into a commentary on physical gallery space.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / The group exhibit “Medium Rare” – on display at Subtitled NYC, a second-floor Greenpoint gallery with a skylight – features paintings by Amanda Ba, Jacob Patrick Brooks, Marcus Civin, Sam Cockrell, Kevin Ford, Annette Hur, and Kate Liebman. It was curated – or rather, prompted – by Jaejoon Jang, who instructed the artists to select examples of what they considered unfinished work. Without knowledge of this specification, it would be difficult for a viewer to consider the pieces unfinished. The overarching cohesiveness of the show makes each one seem resolved. In light of Jang’s command, though, they can also be seen as hovering just outside of the artists’ respective oeuvres, meeting only some of their criteria for finished work.
Contributed by Zach Seeger /As the story goes, James Rosenquist’s images were inspired by his experience as a sign painter in the late 1950s. Blue-collar toil transcended the quotidian and informed not only the scale but also the imagery of Rosenquist’s paintings. The work seemed the most obvious new iteration of modernist opportunism, embracing culture’s latest ready-made: advertising. It did not elevate the artist to greater marketability through grand exhibition, however, but merely led to the appropriation of popular images for display on canvas in galleries. While the paintings sought to deconstruct the PR of capitalism (recall Edward Bernays’ “add an egg”), they also served to keep the capitalist machine humming. In juxtaposiing 20th-century American abstraction and 21st-century images of 19th-century landscape painting, Joani Tremblay tries to avoid this kind of regression in her solo show “Intericonicity” at Harper’s Chelsea 512.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Nora Griffin’s ostensibly playful, jangled paintings, on display at Fierman West, reflect not only a galvanizing appreciation of the moment but also a deep understanding of art history and its connection to the contemporary zeitgeist. There is a sheer, crude brilliance about them, and it is inspiring.
Two Coats of Paint Conversations In 2020, Two Coats of Paint began using the Clubhouse phone app to present live discussions about art and the art world. Our goal was to provide interesting art content for studio listening. Last year, we began to archive the edited conversations in a podcast […]
In her new paintings on view at Gold/Scopophilia, Ashley Garrett explores the concept of the meadow: a place of respite, slowed time, and stable form seen through a pinhole into a complete world.
