Boston-based artist Bren Bataclan is giving 30 paintings away in San Francisco as an antidote to the recession. “I think as an artist during this downturn this is the best way that I can help out – to just spread cheer and be positive,” Bataclan told Channel 7’s Terry McSweeney. […]
Month: December 2008
Modern Painters licenses critics and shortlists artist-collaborators
In a departure from the usual end-of-year roundups and top 10 lists, Modern Painters invited Peter Schjeldahl, Vince Aletti, Sarah Kent, and Matthew Collings to renew their Art Critics License�a document based on an actual US visa application recently completed by one of their editors. They also put together their […]
Val�rie Favre: The rabbit-woman
Berlin-based Val�rie Favre is having her first US solo show this month at Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles. Favre’s ongoing series of “Lapine” paintings blend art-historical references with mythological figures and subjective experiences, weaving together thickly-painted narratives at once bizarre and mysterious. “Lapine” is a French play on words that […]
Andrew Morrow: Serious and ambitious, wildly cheeky and corrosively irreverent
Gary Michael Dault reports in the Globe and Mail that Andrew Morrow’s work is riddled with contradiction. “It is simultaneously both serious and ambitious, wildly cheeky and often corrosively irreverent (two of the small paintings in his current exhibition are called ‘Still Life Painted While Consciously Avoiding the Topic of […]
John Andrews and Emil Lukas explore the real in San Francisco
In San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker reports that the complexity in Andrews’ work lies in the viewer’s encounter with it. “As sharply defined as each piece appears, its color fluctuates unpredictably with changing vantage points and time of day, none more lushly than the big rose-colored piece designated “08-14” (2008), […]
The year in Art Blogging
Here are our favorite moments in art blogging from 2008, in no particular order:� When Pearl Montana, a Canadian oil-and-gas company, wanted to drill for oil near Smithson�s Spiral Jetty, high-minded Tyler Green (Modern Art Notes), pulling out all the stops with in-depth daily coverage, managed to draw enough mainstream […]
Schjeldahl hurts David Bonetti’s feelings
St. Louis Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti has just finished reading Seven Days in the Art World, and he isn’t happy. “Rodney Dangerfield ain�t got nothin on me. I�m a loser, baby, so why don�t you kill me. At least that�s what The New Yorker�s art critic Peter Schjeldahl implies. […]
“In these scary times, investment in spiritual expansion may be the best investment of all”
In the NY Times Ken Johnson reports that “The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors” in Chelsea will close at the end of this month. “That may not mean much to most of the art world�s hipper denizens, but it will to visionary and psychedelic-art fans for whom the chapel has been […]
Frannsen: Visual gibberish or fearless painting?
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker swoons over new work by Southern California painter Sheri� Franssen. “Her paintings may strike unprepared eyes as visual gibberish, but that’s the first proof of her fearlessness as an artist. To comprehend these abstractions, even merely to stay with them, requires moving repeatedly […]
Chapuis and Mattera: “Stop thinking and just gaze on something beautiful”
In the Boston Globe Cate McQuaid reports that some artists make art not as a means of provocation or cultural commentary, but for beauty’s sake. “Katharina Chapuis, who has a show at Alpha Gallery, and Joanne Mattera, who has encaustics (paintings made with pigmented wax) up at Arden Gallery, work […]
