Award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 15, 2021
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 […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In a typically penetrating New York Times column earlier this month, David Leonhardt pointed out that one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s many insights was the need to showcase as well as merely extend government largesse in order to impress upon its beneficiaries the ongoing value of the […]
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 ...