Christine Gray’s paintings depict models she creates using common craft materials, the works become fantastically abstracted scenes based on objects domestic and kitsch. “I represent landscape through several degrees of mediation (first by building modest micro-sculptures, then through painting) using themes of failed geometry, failed architecture, and failed illusionism.” Gray […]
Month: April 2008
“The lice are part of the art.”
According to BBC News, seven German artists are living with lice in their hair in an Israeli museum for three weeks in the name of art. Milana Gitzin-Adiram, chief curator of the Museum of Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, said: “Art is no longer just a painting on the wall. […]
Tony Fitzpatrick’s city of ghosts
In the Chicago Sun-Times Kevin Nance profiles Tony Fitzpatrick, whose expeditions with his dad have become the central narrative of his just-completed magnum opus: ‘The Wonder — Portraits of a Remembered City,’ a simultaneously intimate and epic series of drawing-collages commemorating his father and the city they explored together. “The […]
Paul Wonner, 87, dies in San Francisco
Paul Wonner, long associated with Bay Area Figuration, died Wednesday in San Francisco of natural causes on the eve of his 88th birthday. Art critic Kenneth Baker wrote the obit in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Mr. Wonner enjoyed collegial support for his work from originators of the Bay Area Figurative […]
It’s official: Peter Schjeldahl writes good, er, I mean, well
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute have named Peter Schjeldahl the winner of the 2008 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. Established in 2006 to recognize writers who advance public appreciation of visual art in a way that “is grounded in scholarship yet appeals to a broad range […]
Maria Lassnig: Embarrassment is a challenge
Viennese painter Maria Lassnig, nearly 90, has been producing work over a period of 60 years in Paris, New York and Vienna. An avant-garde pioneer with a feminist viewpoint, Lessnig’s work was included in “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” Lassnig continues to paint powerful, bold and introspective work that […]
NY Times Art in Review: Substraction, Dieter Roth
“Substraction,” curated by Nicola Vassell. Deitch Projects, New York, NY. Through May 24. Artist include Kristin Baker, Dan Colen, Rosson Crow, Elizabeth Neel, Sterling Ruby, Aaron Young. Roberta Smith: “The idea is that the artists in this show fuse the scale, painterliness and frequent performance aspects of postwar abstraction with […]
Dennis Hollingsworth’s first LA show in five years
In the LA Times, Holly Myers writes that “the paint — presumably dry, but only recently so — fills the room with a lush, heady scent that seems to seep into one’s very pores, enveloping the viewer in the work’s exceptionally visceral presence….The forms are abstract but made, in large […]
Jen Mazza: “It’s easier, maybe it’s more honest, to be mocking.”
In The Star-Ledger, Dan Bischoff profiles Jennifer Mazza, a painter who lives in Newark above Hobby’s Deli at Branford Place and Halsey Street. She’s been an artist-in-residence at the Newark Museum and at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1 on the strength of her tiny oil paintings of hands. […]
Tony Blair’s official portrait: unbuttoned self-reinvention
In his blog at the Guardian Unlimited, Jonathan Jones reports that Tony Blair’s official portrait, painted by Phil Hale, was unveiled last night at the Houses of Parliament “There’s no point in fussing overmuch about the technical qualities of a painting like this. Short of commissioning Lucian Freud, you’re hardly […]
