Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / These times demand both mordant humor and serious contemplation, which helps explain the prevalence of meticulously packaged black comedies in cinema. Two prominent and very good ones that come to mind are Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a diamond-hard dissection of the extended kill-chain of […]
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 […]
Brooklyn Kentler International Drawing Space / Joanne Howard: Skid Marks / 353 Van Brunt St., Brooklyn, NY / April 10 to May 30 Peninsula Art Space / Mike Olin: Infinite Get / 352 Van Brunt Street, Brooklyn, NY / closes May 9 Pioneer Works / Patty Chang: Milk Debt video […]
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 like the cutting boards that inspired them. The paintings are based on textiles that Grabner altered by pulling threads out and creating grid-like patterns. The […]
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 Jonathan Stevenson / The art that accompanies magazine articles usually seems decorative and functional, there merely to cheer up black-and-white text and interrupt regimented columns. Rarely does it well-nigh embody the article itself. William Powhida’s portrait of Joe Biden, centered below the title of Fintan O’Toole’s “To Hell […]
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 […]
Cézanne’s pursuit
If there’s one word that sums up Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), the subject of this massive MoMA exhibition, it’s “struggle.”
Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: June 2021
A painting-centric guide to art exhibitions in New York City, featuring Wendy White at Denny Dimin, Josh Abelow's take on abstraction at Magenta Plains, and Alyssa Fanning at Platform Project ...
Invitation to Pause
"Pause" is a restful, thoughtful summer group show featuring Bill Albertini, Stephen Bron, Eric Brown, Sharon Butler, Peter Krashes, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Michelle Vaughan, and Andrew Witkin.
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 ...
Closed-Eye Hallucinations with Jennifer Coates
Paul Whiting talked with Jennifer Coates about her experience while stricken with Covid, her strategy for continuing to work while stuck in bed, and how she developed a series of ...
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 ...
History: Artist-run galleries in NYC in the 1950s and 1960s
At artist-run galleries, the conversation centers on art rather than commerce. Alternative spaces provide a place for unknown and under-recognized artists to mount exhibitions, for curators to organize their first thematic shows, and for established artists ...
Ashley Garrett’s dynamic pastoral
In her new paintings on view at Gold/Scopophilia, Ashley Garrett explores the concept of the meadow: a place of respite, slowed time, and stable form seen through a pinhole into ...
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 ...
Piranesi and the anxiety of modernity
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'Invenzione, 1749, etching, 25 1/16 x 19 7/16 inches
Contributed by Armin Kunz / Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) created innumerable views of ancient and modern ...