Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, April 12, 2021
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Rebecca Purdum: Touch, tactility, materiality
Contributed by Carol Diamond / In very good art, stark opposites like life and death, night and day, and pain and joy co-exist in harmonious juxtaposition, eliciting the powerful fusion ...
Foraging and Landing: A conversation between Angelina Gualdoni, Fabienne Lasserre, and Sangram Majumdar
Angelina Gualdoni, installation view at Asya Geisberg
Fabienne Lasserre, installation view at Turn Gallery
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / I think I met Angelina first through a mutual friend Karla Wozniak when ...
Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: March/April 2021
James Cohen: Elias Sime, TIGHTROPE: ECHO!?, installation view
Brooklyn
Kentler International Drawing Space / Joanne Howard: Skid Marks / 353 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn, NY / April 10 to May 30
Peninsula Art ...
Poetic Pursuits: The Truffle Hunters
Left to Right: Birba (dog), Aurelio Conterno in The Truffle Hunters. Image by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.
Contributed by Paul D'Agostino / A few foragers gathered in ...
Art and Film: Ursa meta
In Black Bear, screenwriter-actress Allison (Aubrey Plaza) works to come up with an idea during a writing residency.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / These times demand both mordant humor and serious ...
Ilana Savdie: Carnival abstraction
Ilana Savdie, Low pitch complicity, 2021, Beeswax, oil, and acrylic on canvas stretched on board, 38 × 48 inches
Contributed by Paul Laster / Blurring the boundary between abstraction and ...
Lauren Luloff: Absorbed into color
Lauren Luloff, F, 2020, dye on silk, 96 x 87 inches
Contributed by Erin Yerby / Lauren Luloff’s semi-transparent panels of silk, in their very stillness, betray a slight flutter of ...
Kathryn Lynch: Allusive places
Installation view of Kathryn Lynch’s "Between the Streets" at Turn Gallery on the Upper East Side (All photos courtesy of Turn Gallery)
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Sometimes we see something ...
Gallery crawl: Miller, Grabner, Pincus-Whitney, Boyle, Otero, Pope.L, Nelson, Arcangel
Allison Miller at Susan Inglett Gallery
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I stopped by James Cohan on Grand Street to see Michelle Grabner’s beautiful show of small-scale paintings and panel pieces, sized ...
Art and Film: Painter-Spy in Bridge of Spies
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Bridge of Spies begins and ends with a painting. Steven Spielberg’s latest film is a penetrating and affecting consideration of the Cold War, based on ...