Cycloramas were a popular form of entertainment in the late 1800’s, both in America and Europe. These massive cylindrical paintings were displayed in special rotundas and enhanced with landscaped foregrounds, life-size figures, and realistic lighting. The result was a three-dimensional effect that surrounded the viewers who stood on a central […]
Month: September 2008
Richter’s automaton paintings
Gerhard Richter’s new project, “4900 Colours,” comprises 196 square panels of 25 coloured squares that can be reconfigured in a number of variations, from one large-scale piece to multiple, smaller paintings. Richter has developed a new configuration of the panels especially for this exhibition, formed of 49 paintings of 100 […]
Mary Heilmann: Not such a dumb girl
Mary Heilmann’s exhhibition at Zwirner & Wirth features paintings and works on paper from the last three decades. Heilmann draws inspiration from her own experience, including the Southern California surf culture of her childhood, the San Francisco beatnik era of her teen years, the punk and new wave music scenes […]
NY TImes Art in Review: Loeb, Brown, Ackermann
“Damian Loeb: Synesthesia, Parataxic, Distortion, and the Shadow,” Acquavella, New York, NY. Through Oct. 7. Ken Johnson: “With its portentous Damien Hirst-like title, ‘Synesthesia, Parataxic Distortion, and the Shadow,’ it promises something more spectacular than the pleasant, conscientiously well made, illustrative paintings that make up this exhibition.Mr. Loeb produces what […]
Glantzman: Searching for self
At ArtCritical, Cathy Quinlan reports that Judy Glantzman’s work, on view at Betty Cunningham, has evolved. “In the first years this decade, Judy Glantzman�s paintings were of the single figure, painted and repainted: female, with multiple personalities and isolated in space. Suddenly, in 2004, there was a population explosion. It […]
Reactionary painter puts money where his mouth is
Well-known Scottish landscape painter John Lowrie Morrison, speaking in National Gallery of Scotland on the Mound, has launched the second Jolomo awards, which offer a �20,000 first prize to the best young emerging landscape artist in Scotland. Morrison, whose own prolific output ensures that he earns about �2million a year […]
Tom Schmitt at Howard Scott
In The Village Voice, RC Baker reports that Schmitt’s years of painting make all the difference in these digitally-created formalist compositions. “The four orange squares in ‘Quad’ (2005) are divided by a gray grid; the transition between the two colors is as smoothly elusive as the intersections of colored light […]
Why painters keep painting
In the NY Times Holland Cotter explains why Giorgio Morandi kept painting, even after his hands became shaky and his eyesight started to fail. “You might ask other artist-poets this question: Joseph Albers, say, or Paul Klee or Agnes Martin or a New York artist I know who sits down […]
“Francis Bacon was one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century…”
Thanks, Art Observed, for putting together this link list of articles about the Francis Bacon show at Tate Britain. Bacon, like Frida Kahlo, is one of those painters with whom every freshman art student falls in love. Later, after spending a few semesters in the studio, they’re inevitably drawn to […]
Rothko edits Rothko
In The Independent Claire Dwyer Hoggs talks to Chris Rothko, Mark Rothko‘s son and editor of The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, a new book of his father’s writing. “‘People imagine my father had a glamorous existence, but he lived mainly in slums,’ Christopher says, as he settles into his […]
