Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 21, 2022
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It’s quite a feat for a figurative painter to achieve both intimacy and remove simultaneously, but Jennifer Packer accomplishes just that in “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” the vibrant survey of her work at the Whitney.
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 […]
Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide: January 2022
Contributed by Sharon Butler / If January feels dreary, cheer up. Take a look at this long, interesting list of exhibtions that are opening in NYC.
Robert Janitz: Reverie over reality
Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Library of a Dream,” Robert Janitz’s elegantly installed exhibition, on view at Canada through January 21, is a knockout. Janitz spent years in intense meditation ...
Michael Krebber: The poetry in painting?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Like Michael Krebber, I love beginnings and find meaning in irresoluteness. Lately, though, in my own work and that of other painters, I have come ...
Art and Film: The low spark of High Art
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / It’s a rare movie that finds the sweet spot between storyline cohesiveness and minimal exposition as well as great tone. Lisa Cholodenko’s plangent late-nineties gem ...
Wayne Thiebaud and starting over
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The California painter Wayne Thiebaud died on Christmas Day. He was renowned, first and foremost, for his paintings of candies, cakes, and pies, which he ...
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, ...
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Artist of Everything
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Singling out individual works for praise in an exhibition of the size and range of MoMA’s “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction” is almost beside the point ...
Jobi Bicos: Figuration inside and out
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / People love to categorize stuff, however silly it sometimes seems. Despite the best efforts of post-modernist artists to remove separations among media, they have ...
Douglas Degges: The aesthetic curiosities of childhood
Contributed by Cody Tumblin / I sat down with Douglas Degges to talk about "Remembering Accardo Tackle," his recent solo show at St. Ambrose University’s Morrissey Gallery in Iowa ...
Body Language at The Painting Center
Contributed by Carol Diamond / Now on display at The Painting Center, the group exhibition titled “The Body in Question,” a phrase cheekily resonant of a coroner’s report, explores the ...
