Physical and psychological effects of natural and man-made disasters are the subject of Alyssa Fanning’s delicate draawings, on view at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Catalogue Essay
Sue Havens: Encoding history
Sue Havens’ history – her searching and sometimes painful life experiences and her adventurousness in the studio – are distinctly encoded, like a unique double helix of molecular structure, in the complex work she has produced this past year.
Austin Lee’s muscular blankness
Something there badly not wrong –Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho Contributed by David Humphrey / The spinning rainbow symbol interrupts our screen time. Buffered and helpless, we pause with the device to wait, perhaps to sink back into our thoughts or to drift into another task. That rainbow, called by some […]
Catalogue essay: Elisabeth Condon’s flowers and the visionary impulse
Contributed by Jason Stopa / Some painting of the last decade presents itself as politically neutral, simply about aesthetic taste, and lacks any stakes. Others still are incredibly didactic, demanding the viewer agree with their sentiment as much as their surfaces. Somewhere in the nexus of this is a painting […]
Catalogue essay: Paul Pieroni on Peter Halley’s 1980s painting
The aim of this text, which was originally published as “Facts are Useless in Emergencies” in Peter Halley: Paintings of the 1980s The Catalogue Raisonne, is to provide an in-depth analysis of Peter Halley’s painting as it emerged during the 1980s. I engage Halley’s theoretical writing—which extends his visual language—while […]
Catalogue Essay: Aubrey Levinthal at Nancy Margolis
Contributed by Samantha Mitchell / In his definition of heterotopia (of which utopia and dystopia are types) Michel Foucault writes about the mirror as an agent of transformative realization of self in place – simultaneously illuminating and falsifying our own image: I see myself where I am not, in an unreal, […]
Catalogue essay: Jennifer Riley’s Machine Series Paintings
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When Brooklyn artist Jennifer Riley began making large-scale abstract paintings using discarded laser-cut pieces of steel, she connected with a century of artists preoccupied with the deconstructed machine. They ranged from post-World War I Dadaists like Raoul Hausmann and Francis Picabia whose images of humans […]
Thomas Micchelli on Cordy Ryman
Note: This essay, written by artist and art writer Thomas Micchelli, originally appeared in the catalogue for “Free Fall,” Cordy Roman‘s 2017 solo show at Tower 49 Gallery. The eight-foot-long two-by-fours cascade down the wall from the farthest corner of Cordy Ryman’s double-height Sunset Park studio: wooden lengths in forest green, […]
New geometries: Embracing narrative and content
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Zombie Formalism–innocuous abstraction employing a pastiche of art-historical references and made to fulfill undiscriminating art market demand–has given abstract painting a bad name. Alex Baker offers a vibrant remedy. At Fleischer/Ollman in Philadelphia, where he is gallery director, Baker has curated “New Geometries,” a fine […]
Michael Voss: Beyond the absolute
The following is an interesting catalogue essay that critic Carter Ratcliff wrote for Brooklyn painter Michael Voss’s 2014 solo show at George Lawson in San Francisco. Ratcliff rightly suggests that painters aren’t resigning themselves to imperfection, but rather cultivating it. Abstract painting was born from a yearning for absolutes. In […]
