(NOTE: This is Two Coats of Paint’s thousandth post! To read our very first post, from May 9, 2007, click here.)
“Dana Schutz: Missing Pictures,” Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, NY. Through April 25. Roberta Smith reports: Dana Schutz�s new paintings look a tad better on the gallery�s Web site than in person. Compression helps, which suggests the larger, more complicated canvases might be better at two-thirds size and that the bright colors could be intensified. Or maybe their complexity of palette and composition is not mutually enhancing; these canvases need to get away from one another. Still, Ms. Schutz deserves credit for not repeating herself. She continues her ambitious exploration of color, technique and history, both political and painterly. She now works in oil and acrylic, with thicker paint commingling with wispy, Color Fieldy stains.
“Andr� Ethier: Heading South,” Derek Eller, New York, NY. Through May 16. Ken Johnson reports: Andr� Ethier�s funny, faux-na�ve paintings resemble the works of a self-taught, semi-talented high school stoner steeped in heavy-metal music, fantasy novels and the visionary arts of the French Symbolists….The appeal of Mr. Ethier�s work is in the tension between lowbrow and highbrow. He�s a canny semiotician toying with kitschy craft and romantic signifiers of longing for an earthier and more soulful kind of world. The viewer stretches between opposite states of mind: one conceptually knowing, the other imaginatively tantalized. This is a good deal: you get to have it both ways.
Read the entire Art in Review column here.
