Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 15, 2021
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Spencer Lewis’s large, colorful, gestural abstractions, on view at Harper’s Chelsea, are deliciously physical and boldly display the process of their own creation. Visible from the street and hung close together, the paintings get right in your face as you enter the gallery. Gallerist Harper […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Mira Schor’s galvanizingly insistent new paintings continue her exploration of self and the disembodied mind. Many painters traffic in purposeful ambiguity, using metaphor and abstraction to leave meaning-making for the viewer. Schor’s work, however, is not mysterious or enigmatic: her intention is to tell us […]
Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / Intriguingly titled “Light Phrase,” Jill Nathanson’s current exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery features luminous planes of crystalline color meeting and overlapping in harmony. The color is sensual, the light carefully calibrated, the edges thoughtfully considered. These new paintings, many larger in scale than her previous […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “Dream Paintings,” Ken Weathersby’s solo show at Minus Space, the surfaces of his tidy geometric abstractions feature carefully crafted, oddly shaped holes. Handwritten passages of text have been inserted into the voids, as if the painting were an oversized frame for, and possibly the […]
Hello 2021! Thanks, again, readers, for your generous contributions to the Two Coats of Paint 2020 fundraising campaign. An invitation: Among the exhibitions opening this month, my show of paintings at Theodore:Art (56 Bogart Street in Bushwick) called “Morning in America” opens on Friday, January 15. I’ll be there from […]
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 Jonathan Stevenson / By the most salient political parameters – governance, public health, the rule of law – 2020 was one of the worst years in living memory. Hobbled by Covid-19, art overall seemed commensurately downbeat, but also pensively defiant. In cinema, if a dominant theme emerged, it […]
Contributed by Paul Laster / Creating playful paintings with psychological twists, Clayton Schiff makes his 56 Henry exhibition debut with the solo show Small World, featuring five medium-scale canvases (all from 2019 and 2020) that depict cartoon-like characters in poetic realms. A 2009 RISD BFA grad, Schiff has been gaining […]
Lamentable deaths occur every year, but in 2020 Covid-19 has made for an especially grim atmosphere of loss. In the art world, painter Jackie Saccoccio and art historian Barbara Rose are the most recent to be mourned across social media and in thoughtful obituaries in the New York Times. Artnet […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Charles Willeford – Guthrie-esque hobo, World War II hero, pulp-fiction genius – was one of the best crime writers of his generation, influential yet under-appreciated. Among his many books, Cockfighter became a cult-classic film starring Warren Oates, Miami Blues a quirky eighties jaunt with Alec […]
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...