Although I won’t be at Art Basel Miami this year, I’m going to Venice for the 53rd International Art Exhibition in June. The exhibition opens to the press on June 4, and, unlike recent incarnations which cleaved toward video and installation projects, 53 will embrace traditional media such as painting […]
Month: November 2008
St Louis: Max Cole and Eva Lundsager
In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, art critic David Bonetti picks a couple of abstract shows in St. Louis. “Max Cole is a nonobjective painter; her work is determined by the components of its making: the linen surface, the acrylic medium, the pigment restricted to tones of black and white. The […]
Enrique Mart�nez Celaya: “Shiny paint makes me feel like I can�t breathe”
In the NY Times, Jori Finkel profiles Enrique Mart�nez Celaya, whose show recently opened in LA. “The questions he explores in painting (and in his related writings) belong to religion and philosophy: the meaning of life and death, the purpose of consciousness, and what it means to be good or […]
Questioning Canadian painting’s carte blanche
The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art presents “Carte Blanche/Vol. 2: Painting,” a comprehensive survey of contemporary Canadian painting; at Toronto’s Power Plant, the RBC Canadian Painting Competition is underway. In the Globe and Mail, Sarah Milroy suggests that the idea of exhibitions limited exclusively to painting feels dated. “All-painting exhibitions […]
Carol Padberg’s type at Real Art Ways
In the Hartford Courant Roger Catlin reports that the newspaper world doesn’t pay too much attention to the fonts of type “that march our ideas along, line by line, day in and day out, in column inches. There’s little time to consider the spurs, tails and eyes of the letters: […]
Terry Winters: Haltingly optimistic
In The Village Voice RC Baker writes that there’s something hard-fought and heartening about Terry Winters’s new paintings at Matthew Marks. “Chunks of intense color tumble and collide across garish or sooty or muddy matrices. Like our times, they’re fraught, complex, and scarred over, but also haltingly optimistic….In a 1992 […]
USA Painting Fellows: Barkley L. Hendricks and Rodney McMillian
Of 50 fellows selected for United States Artists Fellowships this year, only two are painters: Barkley L. Hendricks, and Rodney McMillian. According to Hamza Walker’s summary of the selection process, “there was unbridled zaniness, calculated zaniness, and garden-variety zaniness. There was no-punches-pulled politics, and there was formalism for formalism�s sake. […]
Miquel Barcelo sees the world dripping toward the sky
Spanish painter Miquel Barcelo used over 100 tons of pigments from all over the world to make a 16,000-sqare-foot brightly-colored abstract painting for the United Nations offices in Geneva. “On a day of immense heat in the middle of the Sahel desert, I recall with vivacity the mirage of an […]
Grace Hartigan is dead
In the Baltimore Sun Mary Carole McCauley reports that Grace Hartigan, 86, passed away Saturday after a long illness. “Grace Hartigan was adamant, even imperious about the arrangements for how she would be memorialized. And she will get her way, as Hartigan, a seminal figure in the U.S. art world […]
Eyal Danieli: Helicopters, bombers and camouflage
Israeli-born, New York-based Eyal Danieli paints metaphors for aggression that explore the contradictory emotions of being both victim and victimizer. His show at Elizabeth Harris came down on the 8th, but I wanted to mention it nonetheless. In The Brooklyn Rail Tom Micchelli reports that the paintings’ “irresistible graphic sensuality […]
