Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Welcome to the April edition of the Two Coats painting-centric guide to art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We’ll be updating next week, so if you have shows opening in the middle or at the end of the month, and you want us to consider them for inclusion, shoot us a note at staff@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put “NYC Guide” in the subject line.
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Turley Gallery in Hudson is moving to a new space on Warren Street and opening three new shows on April 6. Other notable April openings include Becca Lowry and Ashley Lyon at Headstone in Kingston, Debra Ramsay and Leslie Roberts at the Garrison Art Center, and Susan Still Scott and Pearl Cowan at LABspace in Hillsdale. I’m also looking forward to the opening of The Re Institute in Millerton for the season with a show of new work by the space’s founder Henry Klimowicz. At nearby Geary there are a few weeks left to see Will Hutnick’s solo exhibition and on April 20 the gallery will open a solo show of paintings by ransome. Finally, I’m excited to announce the opening of Talking Threads, an exhibition I curated at Susan Eley Fine Art in Hudson featuring seven artists working with textiles. The opening is Saturday, April 6. I hope to see you there!
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Just over a dozen photographic works, mostly on paper, make up this rewardingly idiosyncratic three-person show “A Matter of Time” at Platform Project Space in Dumbo. Leslie Wayne, a well-regarded and unconventional abstract painter herself, has carefully selected and arranged mostly monochromatic works by Simone Douglas, Joy Episalla, and Beatrice Pediconi. All three artists are engaging with water, time, and photography, and challenging deeply entrenched ideas about how photography can be realized and presented.
Contributed by Rebecca Chace / I met Massinissa Selmani at Civitella Ranieri, an artist residency in Umbria, Italy where we were part of the first group of artists they welcomed coming out of the pandemic in spring 2021. We became a very close-knit group and several collaborations have emerged from our time together. “A Fault in the Mirage,” Selmani’s first New York solo show, is on view at Jane Lombard Gallery through April 27. We spent time at the opening and followed up with a conversation about his work.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took the train to Trenton, New Jersey – TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES, the old slogan goes – to see Caroline Burton’s painting exhibition “Way Finding” at the Riverside Gallery in the New Jersey State Museum, which also includes a freestanding library, planetarium, theater, a natural history exhibit, an indigenous peoples’ exhibit, and the obligatory outdoor Calder. The complex, originally designed by Frank Grad and Sons of Newark and constructed in 1965, is a classic example of the liberal utopian/modernist cultural center typically frowned upon these days. But I’m happy to report that the campus, self-contained like Lincoln Center, was teeming with visitors from all walks of life. It is very much a living museum, and ideal for Burton, a reconstructed modernist, who in fact depicts its architecture in some of the works on view.
Contributed by Larissa Bates / Vera Iliatova’s solo show “The Drawing Lesson,” on view at Nathalie Karg Gallery, offers cinematic montages of female artists at work in a Brooklyn studio. The nine gestural oil paintings in warm greys and buttery mauves, with skirted figures moving indoors to backlit space, mark a departure from the haunted pastoral landscapes of Iliatova’s previous exhibitions. The dappled light, painterly marks, and muted pallet of the composite narrative interiors bring to mind Susan Lichtman as well as Manet. Gritty barges, a consistent motif of Iliatova’s, chug up the East River, glimpsed through single-paned industrial windows. These and concrete floors are reminders of the post-industrial spaces carved into the Brooklyn studios where Iliatova has spent decades working. As Dudley Andrew observes in the press release, she renders the place of rendering, depicting young women as simultaneously busy and solitary.
Contributed by David Carrier / What does it mean for a contemporary artist to be inspired by an older text or artwork? The Gospel of Matthew 15:14 says: “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Moved by those words in 1568, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Blind Leading the Blind, which hangs in Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Now stirred by that picture, Beatrice Caracciolo, a young artist who grew up in that city, has drawn The Blind 16: one large image of the blind beggars and several smaller details also derived from the Bruegel. Between Matthew and Bruegel and then Bruegel and Caracciolo, there’s a kind of creative slippage whereby the meaning of the prior statement is transformed. At each stage, Matthew’s basic conception is partly preserved while something is added or subtracted. He doesn’t specify, for instance, that there are six blind men. Caracciolo shows his entire work, but without color, in grisaille. In smaller rectangular works on paper, she focuses on the trees and on some of the individual blind men.
Contributed by Riad Miah / Andrea Belag, in her current exhibition, “Twombly’s Green”at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, uses oil paint as a calligrapher might, employing sweeping gestural marks, scrapes, and wipes, as well as color itself, as her visual vocabulary. The paintings, of course, are not to be “read” in a linear manner but rather to be encountered and experienced.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Nora Riggs tells stories of our modern lives, recording their details. Her mindfully hung exhibition at Tappeto Volante, titled “Uneasy Listening,” traces how her paintings developed, beginning with four small gouaches placed on the lefthand wall of the front chamber. They appear as modest studies. But they also isolate anxious drama, such as that of a young woman searching for a missing earring on the dance floor, in a different way than the larger paintings in the main chamber do. The gouaches feel more interior, spotlighting vignettes, whereas the larger paintings pass searchlights over more expansive tales. Riggs’s gouaches also reveal her penchant for pattern and decoration, leading me suspect that she’s internalized the lessons of Matisse.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If the paintings in Mary Shah’s 2022 show “Dream Opera” suggested struggle from below against a resistant surface, her new ones in “Sunbird” – now on view at Rick Wester Fine Art and at least as impressive – declare liberation and ascent. Reinforcing this sense of breakthrough is a pronounced directionality, epitomized in Starlings (Jewel Street), whose arrow-like line zigs decisively to the left. The title presumably discloses Shah’s proximate visual inspiration. But, showcasing abstraction’s great virtue of allusiveness, which she is adept at harnessing, the painting’s imagery could also summon fish in the ocean, for instance, as well as birds in the sky.
