Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Thomas Berding�s insouciant show �Field Test,� at The Painting Center in Chelsea, is a smart, spirited consideration of the tension between the whirl and the pastoral. The seven paintings � and their witty titles � are straightforward enough to impart primary messages clearly, but that leaves […]
Contributed by Riad Miah / �Just Hold On,� the title of Gary Petersen�s second show at McKenzie Fine Arts on the Lower East Side, fits the arresting energy of his work, his playful palette, and the rich provenance of his geometric abstractions. Perhaps he is referring to the moment a person […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Mike Kelley, the late conceptual artist, famously cast stuffed animals both as children�s escape hatches from worldly nastiness and as the potential tools of their nefarious seducers or demons. Writer-director Issa L�pez maintains this duality in Tigers Are Not Afraid, a film of stunning inventiveness, brutality, […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler /�Calling Catherine Howe�s whirling, monochromic flower paintings �the pleasure garden� is archly ironic, like calling de Kooning�s early paintings �women.� Although her canvases�outwardly do describe floral forms, their deeper meaning lies in the large, threatening scale, the aggressively fluid use of materials, and the evident physical�energy […]
Contributed by Ken Buhler / One afternoon last summer I decided to go to the National Gallery in London. I was in upstate New York, idly turning the pages of a book of Italian paintings, when I came upon Piero Della Francesca�s Baptism. Its geometric perfection and its eloquence struck me […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For a while it looked as though William Powhida might be painting himself into an existential corner. His mission was to sensitize his audience to the hypocritical churn of the art market — to the reality that what made producing something putatively nobler and loftier than […]
Contributed by Martin Bromirski / Frankie Gardiner lives in an old house across from a barn at the curve of a narrow road. Her yard is almost overgrown, the forest is closing in. With the lights out inside her house, near the end of an August day, I visited to […]
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Lucy Mink was the first artist I came to know solely through Facebook. She didn�t live in Brooklyn but in rural Contoocook, New Hampshire, and I became cyber-obsessed, waiting for each new post from her studio. What I saw then and continue to see today in Mink�s work is […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / British painter Rachel Howard is in town this month, presenting “L�appel du vide,� her first New York solo show,�at Blain|Southern. Howard is known for a visceral, intuitive approach to�abstraction�that embraces�painting, sculpture, and work on paper. Last week, after she’d finished installing the show, she�and her […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Rivaled only by Los Angeles among cities celebrated in American cinema, New York deserves its own pointedly knowing and satisfyingly chunky essay on films set there. Now the city has one, in the form of Mark Asch�s New York Movies, the latest volume in Little […]
