Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Contributed by Rachel Beach / Sometimes we let the world bury us, if only temporarily. And sometimes we center ourselves, tighten our core, and lift. After a year (or four) that no one could fathom, the onset of spring in New York City coupled with a whiplash vaccine rollout has […]
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 of vastly different emotions through empathy and imagination. The eight large paintings in “Rebecca Purdum, Breathing Painting,” currently on view at […]
Contributed by Paul Laster / Blurring the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Ilana Savdie makes colorful canvases that take the eye on a rollercoaster ride through splashes of paint, flesh and body parts. A recent Yale MFA grad who has continued to work in New Haven over the past year […]
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Sometimes we see something better when we don’t look directly at it. This thought permeated my viewing of Kathryn Lynch’s impressive paintings at Turn Gallery on the Upper East Side. Her current exhibition, fittingly titled “Between the Streets,” showcases her crowning achievement as a painter: […]
Contributed by Erin Yerby / Lauren Luloff’s semi-transparent panels of silk, in their very stillness, betray a slight flutter of movement like “a winged creature that flits from one form to the next.” These windowed-openings onto swaths of spiraling color, seem to approach what Walter Benjamin described as the child’s […]
Contributed by Adam Simon / It has been argued that there is no such thing as an abstract painting anymore, only pictures of abstract paintings. What sounds like a slur on abstract painters is simply an acknowledgement that digital technology, social media and the proliferation of images has affected how […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In the 1960s, Jack Tworkov began to feel as if he had taken Ab-Ex gestural abstraction as far as it could go without repeating himself. Reluctant to keep making paintings in which the once wild and expressive brushstroke would appear a predictable go-to move determined […]
Contributed by Craig Taylor / The late David Byrd’s affecting show, on view at Anton Kern Gallery, revolves around what he called his magnum opus: an artist book, Montrose VA 1958–1988, chronicling his job as an orderly at the New York State Veterans’ Home psychiatric ward. Like many artists of […]
Contributed by Ben Pritchard / Andrew Zarou’s compelling exhibition at The Painting Center is resonant of the comprehensive order that one might covet in a time of unusual disarray, isolation, and uncertainty, when basic aims like survival and sharing have become politicized. Order, in this sense, is not strict thinking […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Martin Kline’s meticulous and thoughtful abstractions, on view at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, are deceptively simple. At first glance, they might appear merely technically accomplished and visually striking. Drill down a little, though, and they recall the action of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and the […]
Thoughts on that small Yuskavage painting
A twelve-inch canvas Lisa Yuskavage included in her exhibition at David Zwirner upstages the entire show and much of the work the artist has exhibited to date.
Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: October 2021
Welcome to the Two Coats of Paint painting-centric guide to gallery exhibitions in New York City.
Bad Boyfriends and Pink Bathers : A conversation with Janice Nowinski
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / On the occasion of her first exhibition, beautifully installed at Thomas Erben Gallery, Janice Nowinski and I talked about how time presents itself in every ...
Elizabeth Murray in Buffalo and for the ages
Contributed by Dana Tyrrell / From 1965 to 1967, Elizabeth Murray – a towering presence in contemporary painting who died in 2007 – lived and worked in Buffalo, New York ...
Art and TV: Professor T, an extraordinary burst of mind
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Boy did the otherwise on-the-mark Guardian television critic Lucy Mangan get it wrong. In her 2017 review of the Flemish detective series Professor T, ...
Transmitter: Painting’s undying versatility
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Painting is persistently and emphatically alive and well. Indeed, the notion that it is dead – or, more kindly, moribund – is so vapid and ...
Line: Chance drips, hesitant brushstrokes, calligraphic gestures, notional timelines, yarn, and builder’s caulk
Contributed by Sharon Butler / "Walk the Line" at Platform Project Space in DUMBO presents a variety of line, from chance drips, hesitant brushstrokes, spontaneous calligraphic gestures, and notional timelines ...
Transformation: Douglas Melini’s new work at Miles McEnery
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When I saw Douglas Melini’s new work at Miles McEnery (on view until October 16), I was surprised how much it had changed since I ...
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 ...
Stacy Lynn Waddell: Moving backwards to jump ahead
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / In “Mettle,” Stacy Lynn Waddell’s expansive show at Candice Madey, the artist embraces different cultures throughout the world: Malian life in the 1960s; nineteenth-century American ...
