Contributed by David Carrier / Born in Russia at the very start of this century, Ester Petukhova is a Pittsburgh resident. Her precocious new show includes seven small acrylic paintings, two of them with two parts, on shaped panels. Burgeoning Blue Screen shows a Russian at work on an old-fashioned computer. Indexed Landmarks 1 & 2 depicts a man, naked to the waist, holding a large fish. And Bread with Salt in the Wound presents a large loaf of bread, and is enhanced with glass beads. “It is a customary Slavic tradition,” the gallery label says, “to present bread with salt when welcoming a foreign nation or power.” Welcome, then, to the former Soviet Union.
Search Results for "label/Thinking About Art"
Cezanne’s pursuit
If theres one word that sums up Paul Czanne (1839-1906), the subject of this massive MoMA exhibition, its struggle.
Scene + Sensoria
Scene + Sensoria will be a regularly occurring project of capture, of both the social and aesthetic dimensions of the New York art world, towards […]
Finding Esphyr Slobdokina
Contributed by Peter Plagens / When the annual The Armory Show art fair — which takes place on the piers on the Hudson River in […]
Catalogue essay: Paul Pieroni on Peter Halley’s 1980s painting
The aim of this text, which was originally published as “Facts are Useless in Emergencies” in Peter Halley: Paintings of the 1980s The Catalogue Raisonne, […]
Vija Celmins: To fix the image in memory
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Anyone walking out of the Vija Celmins retrospective that opened last week at SFMoMA thinking how good she is at […]
Carter Ratcliff: Art in the age of Trump
Contributed by Carter Ratcliff / Let�s begin with a painting�not sure it�s a work of art�that could have been painted only now, during Trump�s presidency. This […]
The gap between: “Unfinished” at the Met Breuer
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In recent years, artists have been interested in “slippage.” In painting, that often translates into an exploration of the space […]
Interview: Daniel Kingery in Hunt’s Point
Contributed by Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein / The four paintings I looked at in Daniel Kingery‘s Bronx studio are all medium-sized, human scale. Paint application strategies vary […]
“If wall text leaves us feeling neither more informed nor more enthused, it�s just visual junk.”
At Frieze, Hayward Gallery curator Tom Morton considers museum wall text. “Major museums and galleries provide wall texts because of three problems � or, at […]
The New Casualists
Contributed by Sharon Butler / The pioneers of abstraction — the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists — emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots […]
Field trip: Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Yesterday I went up to MassArt in Boston to participate in an excellent panel discussion about teaching visual arts courses online. I was an undergrad […]
Helen Frankenthaler: More profound than lyric
After seeing the exhibition at Gagosian, I’ve become a huge Helen Frankenthaler fan. Curated by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture […]
Humor vs. irony
Blogging at the NYTimes last week, Princeton French prof Christy Wampole, assailing the hipster mentality, suggested that our culture needs to move beyond irony. Moving […]
Roberta Smith’s advice to young artists: Learn to paint
In the NY Times, Roberta Smith reports that the artists included in “How Soon Is Now?” the 28th version of the annual culmination of the […]








































