Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Contributed by Lisa Taliano / You need to be in front of a John Walker painting in order to get it. Its luminous qualities, the movement, scale, and touch of the brush carries us through the multiple layers and levels of reality shared and contained within and between us. The materiality of the paint works on our bodies directly. Seeing becomes feeling and sensing, understanding. Walker’s new work, now on view at Alexandre Gallery.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / As the title “Blue Italian Skies Above” suggests, walking into the exhibition of Edith Schloss’s paintings now at Alexandre Gallery produces a kind of pastoral contentment. But don’t be fooled into thinking she was a shallow, acquiescent Pollyanna. Lurking in that casual lightness is a distinct quality of mortality and limitation.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When the Minimalists were casting paintings as nothing more than value-free objects in the world and the Pop Artists were knocking them off their elitist pedestal, Vincent Smith (1929-2003) was stalwartly maintaining his belief in the form as a conveyor of social reality and, beyond that, an instrument of political assertion. With great substantive range and technical facility, he invested his throat-grabbingly expressionistic paintings of the urban vistas and signature characters of Harlem and Brooklyn — sixteen now on display at Alexandre Gallery on the Lower East Side — with the brimming emotion of the African American nation. He made the work in this exhibition between 1954 and 1972, so the varied subject-matter is perhaps expected. More remarkable is the potent through-line of his vision.
Stephen Westfall has engaged with geometric abstraction in singularly rich and sophisticated ways for more than thirty years, never complacent but always considered. Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with him at Alexandres new Lower East Side space, where his work is on view through December 22.
Alexandre Gallery presents six recent large-scale paintings that octogenarian Lois Dodd painted during the final years of the Bush Presidency. Each depicts the image of a rural house set fully ablaze; bright orange, red and yellow flames with billowing smoke engulf the house that will surely burn to the ground. […]
In the NY Times Ken Johnson reviews Gregory Amenoff’s show at Alexandre. “In most of Mr. Amenoff�s easel-scale pictures, a large, mysterious form � botanical, geological or geometric � looms close against a distant vista. Color and contrasts of light and dark are pumped up to melodramatic effect. It�s as […]
Alexandre Gallery sent me a link to a thoughtful video interview of Lois Dodd in her studio. Dodd talks about the painting process, why she paints what she sees, and how she survived for so long without a day job. Taped in Dodd’s New York studio by Bill Maynes, January […]
“Both artists engage in a significant degree of abstraction within their realism in the sense of excluding extraneous detail and homing in on what they take to be essences,” declares David Cohen in the NY Sun. “But with Ms. Dodd, the essence is always linked to stuff that is actually […]
Check out my article about Loren MacIver in The Brooklyn Rail’s March issue.“In my first college painting course, which I took several years after completing an art history degree, my teacher Arnold Trachtman said that my painting of the bathroom sink reminded him of Loren MacIver�s work. I had no […]
I spent the day yesterday in the MoMA archives researching a story about Loren MacIver for the March issue of The Brooklyn Rail, so I’m pleased to see that Holland Cotter reviews MacIver’s current show at the Alexandre Gallery today. MacIver, a self-taught painter who lived in NYC with poet […]
