Contributed by Julia Couzens / Paolo Arao’s exuberant textile paintings radiate a bracing freshness, like nautical flags snapping brightly in a cracking breeze. From a distance clear color and crisp geometry flip space backward and forward, causing the eye to toggle in and out of the paintings’ nuanced, irregularly faceted grids. Seen up close, quavering, irregular … read more… “Legacy of the hand: Paolo Arao’s textile paintings”
Author: Editor
Our woman in Havana: The Construction of the Possible, Part 1
This is the first of two posts that highlight work from the 2019 Havana Biennial in and around Old Havana area. Look for Part 2 next week. // Contributed by Katarina Wong / After being postponed due to hurricane damage from 2017, the Havana Biennial, organized by the Centro de Arte Contemporanéo Wifredo Lam, launched on … read more… “Our woman in Havana: The Construction of the Possible, Part 1”
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht: Spontaneity rising
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Contemplating Gerrit Rietveld’s furniture, especially the pieces he made from crates, Björn Meyer-Ebrecht realized that utilitarian furniture can be sculpture, and that sculpture in turn can serve as a utilitarian object. He explores this idea in a thoughtful and lively new show at Owen James Gallery in Soho. A series … read more… “Björn Meyer-Ebrecht: Spontaneity rising”
Interview: Victoria Roth at Brennan & Griffin
Contributed by Sangram Mujumdar / A couple weeks ago, on a rainy spring evening, Victoria Roth and I met up in her studio to continue a discussion that we had started nearly a year ago about her paintings. Over the course of our conversation we talked about her new format, pictorial space, dance, the intense physicality … read more… “Interview: Victoria Roth at Brennan & Griffin”
CounterPointe: Artists and choreographers collaborate
Contributed by Sharon Butler / For the past seven years, Norte Maar, an enterprising and energizing interdisciplinary arts group based in the Cypress Hills neighborhood of Brooklyn and led by Jason Andrew and Julia Gleich, has organized CounterPointe, a series of short dance performances that pair female choreographers with female visual artists. The artists might make costumes, sets, … read more… “CounterPointe: Artists and choreographers collaborate”
New Roads: Mark Sheinkman at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.
Contributed by Brian Dupont / I have long been engaged with Mark Sheinkman’s art. I was in grad school when I first came across an image of one of his paintings in an art magazine. It had twisting lines, interrupted with erasures that read as glitches, wrapped around a pair of tubes, like a scroll … read more… “New Roads: Mark Sheinkman at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.”
Mira Schor casts a spell
Contributed by Heike Moras / A strand of melancholic stillness runs through each of Mira Schor’s early Californian paintings, on view at Lyles & King through May 19. Done roughly around the time the artist spent at Cal Arts in the early 1970s and heavily influenced by her work with the fabled Womanhouse Project of Feminist Art, … read more… “Mira Schor casts a spell”
Zilia Sánchez, surrounded by the sea
Contributed by Katarina Wong / In Zilia Sánchez’s retrospective currently on view at The Phillips Collection, a video shows her on the beach, casting one of her shaped paintings “Soy Isla (I Am an Island)” into the waves. This piece sets the tone for an exceptional exhibition from a fiercely independent artist. Born in Cuba in 1926, and … read more… “Zilia Sánchez, surrounded by the sea”
Bobbie Oliver’s flood of associations
Contributed by Robin Hill / Stepping into Bobbie Oliver’s solo exhibition “Residuals” at High Noon triggers sensations of spaciousness, familiarity, and equanimity. Initially, the paintings invite narratives of how the residues of saturated, ultramarine pigment on canvas came to be, and to what genomes they belong — architecture, the body, the cosmos, the atmosphere, the petri dish? A flood … read more… “Bobbie Oliver’s flood of associations”
Past, present, future: Lizbeth Mitty and Dana James
Contributed by Katie Hector / The handsome and evocative two-person show currently at M. David & Co. Gallery in Bushwick is the first public exhibition that Lizbeth Mitty and her daughter Dana James have had together. Yet, in retrospect, it seems to have been inevitable. Mitty grew up in Queens, and James was raised in … read more… “Past, present, future: Lizbeth Mitty and Dana James”