Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / If you’re looking for pure beauty, or merely a tiny aesthetic tingle, Cameron Rowland’s exhibition is not for you. Contemplating his art in an aesthetic sense is as misguided as looking for cooking tips in a boxing match. Granted, the objects he selects for his […]
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 Jonathan Stevenson / In the 1940s, Philip Guston noted that the problem with figurative art was that it “vanishes into recognition.” By 1960, he was griping about the conceit that abstract art was “autonomous, pure and for itself.” The tension implied by these two conflicting but evidently valid […]
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 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 Sharon Butler / Walking into Michelle Vaughan’s show at Theodore:Art, visitors are confronted with a small oak bookcase, desk, and chair in the center of the gallery. The walls are lined with forty framed portraits of notable conservative women, meticulously rendered in faded pastels on gray paper, that […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / CNN reported that the official portraits of former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have been removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House and replaced with portraits of Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The Grand Foyer, where visitors to the White […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / The time has come to leave Facebook and engage in online activities elsewhere. Difficult though it may seem to leave the art community that we’ve established on that platform, and the ease we feel with the software, I’ve decided to encourage a migration to Tumblr, […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Here is a selection of art articles I’ve gathered from sites around the internet this week, including Painters on Painting, The New Yorker, NY Times, artnet, Hyperallergic, NPR, and Dance Theater of Harlem. At the end, look for a link to a Mother Jones article […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The current of disgust, loathing, and anger in the liberal white consciousness has been pretty steady since Donald Trump was elected president, extinguishing a delicate consensus that the country was moving in more or less in the right direction. Of course, for people like me […]
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
