Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Contributed by Anne MacLeod / I first encountered the installation Antoine’s Organ by Rashid Johnson in 2019 by accident, as it sat serenely inside the ornate and spacious entryway of the Gropius Bau in Berlin. At the tail-end of an exhausting work trip, I was taken aback by the compelling […]
By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently on view in the Whitney Museum’s first-floor lobby gallery (free of charge to the public). And rightly so. Toor’s pictures touch the heart, and his […]
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Now on view as part of the deCordova Museum’s “Visionary New England” exhibition, Josephine Halvorson’s lyrical yet meticulous oil paintings employ no masquerade of myth. Rather, they are documentations of nature that meld history, self, and place. Her intense practice centers on painting chosen […]
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The Museum of Modern Art’s “Fall Reveal” marks the second phase of the museum’s re-telling of the story of Modern Art (the first phase opened in October, 2019), and there are big changes. First, with its $450 million expansion adding 47,000 feet of exhibition space, […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Trump administration has tried to physically cordon off Mexico from the United States, and presumably would just as soon exclude the country from America’s cultural orbit as well. From that perspective, the Whitney’s judiciously conceived exhibition “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art” is […]
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Moths are weird and macabre. Allison Schulnik, in her animated short MOTH in “Suffering From Realness” at Mass MoCA, fully captures their gothic elegance. The moths rhythmically fan eyespots and morph into something new and magical every few seconds, conjuring a resonant line from Mary Oliver’s poem, Sleeping in the Forest: “By […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If mid-century art lovers had thought Robert Rauschenberg’s cheeky erasure of Willem de Kooning’s drawing in 1953 was irreverent, they might have revised their definition of the term twenty years later, when Hans Haacke tendered them detailed questionnaires about their backgrounds and attitudes as they […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Several weeks ago I returned to Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts, where I was an artist-in-residence at Bascom Lodge, the inn at the top of the mountain, in summer 2014. Peter Dudek, a NYC-based sculptor who teaches at Hunter and SVA, has been […]
By Kristen Clevenson / Eric N. Mack‘s exhibition “Lemme walk across the room“ at the Brooklyn Museum and Vivian Suter’s eponymous show at Gladstone Gallery are ostensibly similar. Both artists have completely transformed white cube spaces with thoughtfully hung, colorful, unstretched artworks. Mack’s installation, both commanding and purposeful, remains an assembly of individual […]
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In an exhibition of ten new paintings at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Ruth Root extends her definition of the medium and her own personal language. Since the late 1990s, through a variety of “painting” materials, Root has charted an independent course through a Formalist-sanctioned medium, often […]
Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: May 2021
Cathouse Proper: Leslie Brack, Kenosha, 2021, watercolor on paper, 12 x 12 inches
Frieze New York arrives last week at the Shed in Hudson Yards for a four day post-lockdown ...
Katherine Bradford: Consoled and consoler
In her show at Canada, Katherine Bradford's colors and brushwork radiate a sense of unrestrained joy in material, barely contained by the limits of the canvas.
Invitation: Two Coats Marathon Art Conversation @Clubhouse, May 13
Stop by Clubhouse and join the Two Coats of Paint rooms, Thursday, May 13, 2021.
On May 13, to help kick off another online edition of Dumbo Open Studios, Two Coats ...
Studio visit: Susanna Heller’s endless strength
Paintings in Susanna Heller’s Williamsburg studio
Contributed by Medrie MacPhee / Before Susanna Heller’s paintings were wrapped and shipped to Toronto for her upcoming solo show at Olga Korper, I brought Sharon Butler ...
Art and Film: Casimir Nozkowski’s Brooklyn
Bryan Tyree Henry as Charles in The Outside Story
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Outside Story, writer-director Casimir Nozkowski’s agreeable feature debut, shapes up as a fairly typical indie shaggy-dog ...
Theresa Hackett: Divide and confront
Theresa Hackett, "Around The Bend," Front Gallery View
Contributed by Riad Miah / Theresa Hackett's “Around the Bend,” her second solo show at High Noon Gallery and first at its new ...
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 ...
Art and TV: Professor T, an extraordinary burst of mind
Koen de Bouw as Professor Jasper Teerlinck on Professor T
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Boy did the otherwise on-the-mark Guardian television critic Lucy Mangan get it wrong. In her 2017 ...
Hanging on for dear life: Ann Craven at Karma
Ann Craven, Woodpecker (and the Moon), 2021, 2021, oil on canvas, 84 × 72 inches
Contributed by Zach Seeger / “It’s in the eyes,” a teacher told me about a Giacometti ...
Richard Tuttle sees the light
Richard Tuttle, Silhouette. Opportunity, 2019, fir plywood, lattice strip. glue, nails, spray paints, 33 × 30 × 2 inches
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Richard Tuttle, who has ...