On Tuesday Simone Monasebian, the New York chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, announced that Ross Bleckner will be the next goodwill ambassador for United Nations� agencies. Randy Kennedy reported in the NY Times yesterday that earlier this year Bleckner, who has long been involved in […]
Month: April 2009
Press Release of the Week: Stuart Cumberland at The Approach
“In a detached manner, alone in the studio, Stuart Cumberland begins painting by dropping his trousers and pants to his ankles and howling the names of his forebears. Wielding a brush loaded with juicily coloured dripping paint he doesn�t consider himself to be any different to the suburban so-called sexual […]
Bruce Pollock: Nothing is what it seems
In the Philadelphia Inquirer Edith Newhall reports that Bruce Pollock’s new paintings at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery represent a two-dimensional distillation and multiplication of the sculptures he made in the early 1980s. “They employ some of the same geometry (albeit a miniaturized version) and sublime coloration as the sculptures. But you could […]
Perle Fine: Another tough broad from the New York School resurfaces
Last year, while I was researching an article about Loren MacIver, I came across work by Perle Fine, a dedicated painter who showed with MacIver in NYC in the 50s. I’m looking forward to seeing the traveling retrospective Susan W. Knowles has organized of Fine’s work, currently at the Hofstra […]
Darren Waterston: What’s up with the sublime?
In the San Francisco Chronicle Daniel N. Alvarez reports that Darren Waterston’s paintings are sparked by his interest in past artists’ attempts to depict the vast, all-encompassing world of the sublime. “Waterston took more than 18 months to craft the show, a process he says involved exploring the abstracted ideas […]
The New York School at Bowdoin College
Surveying Lower Manhattan�s disparate art world in the 1950s and early 1960s, “New York Cool,” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, features over 80 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints culled from the collection of New York University. While the post-war period witnessed tremendous creative ferment in […]
Matthew Fisher: Civil War troops and high school marching bands
In ArtForum Joseph R. Wolin reports that Matthew Fisher loves a man in a uniform. “His faux-na�f paintings depict soldiers dressed in fanciful costumes and arranged in elaborate tableaux, as if staging narrative allegories. Yet, for all their folk-art charm, their import remains obscure. What might the artist intend, for […]
Big Love: Artists and Social Networking Technology
“Big Love,” a conversation I’m organizing via the FaceBook Event Invitation feature, is part of the “Status Update” show at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. Confirmed guests include Matt Held (I�ll Have my Facebook Portrait Painted by Matt Held), Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), Sharon Kleinman (author of Displacing Place), […]
Martin Kippenberger shines at MoMA
I finally saw the remarkable Martin Kippenberger retrospective at MoMA yesterday, which is a must-see for anyone who doubts that the physical act of making objects holds meaning. “The career of the German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at 44, was a brief, bold, foot-to-the-floor episode of driving […]
Another nude painting of politicians
The painting, by Italian artist Filippo Panseca, features a nude Mr Berlusconi leaning close to an equally unclad Mara Carfagna. Two years ago, the prime minister told the television starlet, and millions of Italians watching on television, that he would marry her like a shot if he wasn’t married already. […]
