“Leon Kossoff: From the Early Years, 1957-1967,” Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, NY. Through March 28. Roberta Smith reports: This show is an informative treat. The early paintings of the British artist Leon Kossoff are not well known in this country. No American museum even owns one. Of the 10 […]
Tag: Roberta Smith
Munch: Navigating the messiness of his own present
The Munch exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, curated by Jay A. Clarke, brings together approximately 150 works, including 75 paintings and 75 works on paper by Munch and his peers. It is organized around the following themes: loneliness and solitude, the street, anxiety, love and sexuality, death and […]
Bonnard: Folding together form, color and feeling
Roberta Smith on Pierre Bonnard at the Met: “Working simultaneously on several unstretched canvases tacked directly to the wall, he painted largely from memory with the help of quick sketches and watercolors, burnishing his motifs until they approached incandescence. He said that painting from reality distracted him from the task […]
NY Times Art in Review: Tazeen Qayyum, John Wesley, Alexi Worth, Keltie Ferris, Trenton Doyle Hancock
“Tazeen Qayyum,” Aicon Gallery, New York, NY. Through Jan. 11. Karen Rosenberg: “Insects also figure in small paintings by Tazeen Qayyum, who renders cockroaches and other household pests with extraordinary delicacy. (Like the well-known contemporary artist Shahzia Sikander, Ms. Qayyum studied miniature painting at the National College of Arts in […]
Measuring Marlene Dumas
Roberta Smith on Marlene Dumas: “The consistency of this show suggests an artist who settled too early into a style that needs further development. Stasis is disguised by shifting among various charged subjects that communicate gravity in shorthand. Ms. Dumas’s painting is only superficially painterly. The photographic infrastructure is usually […]
“Part of an artist’s job is to do something that hasn’t been done before, not something that has been done to death.”
In the NY Times, Roberta Smith writes that déjà vu is an occupational hazard of art criticism. “You walk out of one gallery and into another only to see what appears to be the show you just left, all over again….Yet, as art formulas go, nothing beats paintings based on […]
Roberta and Elizabeth, BFF
In the NY Times Roberta Smith calls Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits girly. “By fits and starts, this exhibition reveals the complicated fusion of the personal, the painterly and the Conceptual that informs Ms. Peyton’s work. Each image is a point on entwined strands of artistic or emotional growth, memorializing a relationship, […]
The meaning of making
In a recent NY Times art review, Roberta Smith lamented the fact that the current crop of artists seems to have opted out of skill-building courses like painting and drawing, replacing the direct connection to materials with theory and artspeak. Building a “density of expression,” she suggests, is learned not […]
NY TImes Art in Review: Christian Vincent, PN&FP2
Christian Vincent: Runyon Canyon,” Mike Weiss, New York, NY. Through Aug. 16.Ken Johnson reports: “At a moment when articulately imaginative representational painting seems in short supply, it’s interesting to consider Christian Vincent’s mildly wacky works. Formerly a slick, realist painter of dreamy allegories in the Bo Bartlett mold, Mr. Vincent […]
Roberta Smith’s advice to young artists: Learn to paint
In the NY Times, Roberta Smith reports that the artists included in “How Soon Is Now?” the 28th version of the annual culmination of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace, or AIM, program for emerging artists, need to think more deeply about the art they’re making before they begin […]
