Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
When viewing big group shows of unfamiliar artists, I always find something to like. But at �Introductions 2016,� an exhibition of fifty artists at Trestle Projects, I liked nearly everything. Apparently guest curator Jim Osman, a gifted artist a well as director of the Foundations Program at The New School, […]
When Raphael Rubinstein sat down with Jonathan Lasker at Cheim & Read, they discussed Lasker’s process, imagery, and his relationship to Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. “The execution seems very conscious and constructed, and yet the origination of the works is an imaginative process…Things lead into other things, sometimes along […]
At this stage, abstraction is no longer considered confusing or iconoclastic. So what kind of abstract work might earn the title “strange?” Fredericks & Freiser’s buoyant group show “Strange Abstraction” provides a sharp answer. Each of the artists employs his or her materials in an uncompromisingly idiosyncratic way. Like many […]
The snow on the fire escape this morning (courtesy of superstorm Jonas) reminded me of this 2008 piece about Loren MacIver that I originally published in The Brooklyn Rail: In my first college painting course, which I took several years after completing an art history degree, my teacher Arnold Trachtman […]
Long, long ago, when paint-on-canvas art making was deemed irrelevant, painters began exploring experimental processes to make painting-like wall pieces that might wrest the conversation away from “new media” back toward object-making. One such artist is Rudolf Stingel. Nahmad Contemporary presents some of Stingel’s 2001-03 Styrofoam and Celotex Tuff-R panels […]
According to her son Arthur’s poignant post on Facebook, Katherine Bradford moved to New York in the 1980s with two small children in tow. For ten years she slept on a pullout couch, sent them to school, and cooked on a hot plate. All the while she studied painting and […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If they are successful, artists transport those who view their work to a different visual and psychic environment that nonetheless bears some crucial familiarity to the objective one that most people consciously share. The overlapping frames of reference enable critics, artists, and others to talk […]
Color is slippery. Anyone who has ever tried to translate a casually observed color into pigment on canvas knows that the hue will never be the same as what he or she remembers. Variables like light and shadow change the same basic color from warm to cool, light to dark. […]
Finally someone is giving Mystic the love. Troy McMullen reports in the NYPost that the Connecticut shoreline, particularly the stretch between New Haven and Rhode Island, may be the new Hamptons. An easy drive from Manhattan and Brooklyn and accessible via Amtrak and Shoreline East, towns such as Guilford, Clinton, […]
Like many artists last week, I was surprised and deeply saddened by David Bowie’s death. After spending hours gorging on the massive amount of Bowie-related Internet content, I’m inspired by his life and work–his enduring commitment to making art, his brilliant ability to transform his experience into music, his willingness […]
