Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/2012/05/that-scandalous-umbrella/
John Haber visits the exhibition Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting at the Frick Collection, New York, on view through May 13, 2012.
Haber writes that in the painting The Umbrellas, Renoir "surrounded a family dressed for success with the broader shading of clouds, a woman's full-length dress, and a swarm of umbrellas behind her. Those broader fields of blue and gray now fill the picture. Streaked with lighter tones, they show Renoir at his most modern, almost like the color planes of Paul Cézanne. And the critics were on to something, for Renoir was never better than when he cast color theories to the winds and indulged in black. In Moulin de la Galette, blacks ripple through the picture almost like points of light."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2012/04/john-chamberlain-crumpled-color.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about the exhibition John Chamberlain: Choices at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through May 13, 2012.
Sultan writes: "This 'right thing at the right moment', as John Chamberlain describes his process, must have been a great adventure for him. I could still feel the excitement and sense of discovery in his earlier work... The totality of each piece had a sweep and drama, but then there were all those marvelous details of color and surface, all perfect, and perfectly thrilling."
Link to Post:
http://studiocritical.blogspot.com/2012/05/rene-korten.html
Valerie Brennan interviews painter René Korten about his work and process.
Korten notes: "Each painting has its own process of creation. Sometimes I make a painting or a series of paintings, based on a concept, for instance in a recent three-part series, where the first layer of each of the works is a big letter in pencil lines, and the combined letters make up the word DUB. In other paintings there is a more gestural approach. But always my aim is to somehow connect the more rational or intellectual part of creating an artwork to the pure joy of working with paint, to an intuitive and only partly controllable way of working."
Link to Post:
http://abstractcritical.com/2012/05/now-or-else-charline-von-heyl-at-tate-liverpool/
John Bunker reflects on the work of Charline Von Heyl on view at Tate Liverpool through May 27, 2012.
Bunker writes that "Some might see abstraction as a safe haven, 'an escape from it all'. But what if we reverse this idea and look at it as a way of analysing, even critiquing the ever evolving visual realms of late Capitalism? Charline Von Heyl’s work might go some way to answering this question..."
Separately, he notes that Von Heyl's paintings "instantly reveal the act of seeing as an embodied experience. This creates a great physical counterweight to the jarring and startling juxtapositions of painterly techniques and imagery within the work."
Link to Post:
http://arthopper.org/layers-of-space/
Robin Miller reviews the recent exhibition Jennifer Omaitz: Above Ground, Beneath the Surface at 1point618 Gallery, Cleveland.
Miller writes that Omaitz's "work contains layers, not only in the literal sense but also in the many ideas behind it. She works with ideas from the histories of abstraction, architecture, landscapes, natural disasters and tactical responses to painting. The accumulation of layers creates a strong architectural sense of depth. Previous sculptural work captured these ideas of depth and color relation. In this return to painting, she flawlessly combines these ideas in a two-dimensional form."
Link to Post:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2012-04-30/jacqueline-humphries-greene-naftali/
Paul Soto interviews painter Jacqueline Humphries about her work on the occasion of a recent exhibition of new paintings at Greene Naftali, New York.
Humphries remarks that in a "passage about the stylistics of film noir [Paul Schrader] talks about how the character, or figure, in noir films, is unlike the figure in Western or gangster films, where you have a vertical figure against a horizontal background that he stands out from. In film noir, the figure is completely collapsed into the picture. His face is often in shadow when he is speaking, and he is completely embedded in the atmosphere and light of the frame. Schrader says something else that is interesting, he says, 'No figure can speak authoritatively from within a space that is continually being cut into ribbons of light.' I feel this statement captures something that I am after in the paintings, of complete embeddedness, with a sense of the painting itself as figure, conterminously layered on top of and under the ground. The ground is the figure, background is identical to figure."
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/katherine-bradford-at-edward-thorp.html
Kyle Gallup reviews the exhibition Katherine Bradford: New Work at Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, on view through May 26, 2012.
Gallup writes: "The lush surfaces reveal under-painting and a sense that she is searching for her subjects, allowing them to reveal themselves slowly through the painting process and within their own invented time. The layering becomes part of the narrative and gives the work depth and spontaneity. I admire how Bradford is able to balance abstract elements with figurative images, both sharing equal time, neither losing their distinctive differences while adding a fluid interrelatedness."
Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/mitchell-johnson_b_1456753.html
John Seed talks with painter Mitchell Johnson about his work on the occasion of the exhibition Mitchell Johnson: Are You Going With Me? at Res Ipsa Gallery, Oakland, CA on view from May 4 - June 15, 2012.
Johnson observes that in his paintings "the abstraction was always happening, in many ways all of my paintings are the same because they are about how do you get the color to work, which shapes have meaning. The most significant shift in my work was around 2004 when the shapes and areas of color in my paintings became larger as if I had zoomed in on pieces of my earlier paintings to draw attention to the color and the compositional choices."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/50567/gary-stephan-studio/
After visiting painter Gary Stephan's studio, John Yau muses on Stephan's new work.
Yau writes: "Gary Stephan has moved into a place where he is operating without a safety net, where there is no justification or theory that supports what he does, or even the move he makes in a particular work, but there it is, looking back at you. I think that moment where the work reaches a state of otherness is one to be sought after — where you are no longer speaking to it, but it is speaking to you, and you may not even understand what it is saying."
Link to Post:
http://www.supremefiction.com/theidea/2012/04/the-lightness-of-jack-bush.html
James Panero reviews Jack Bush: New York Visit at Freedman Art, New York, on view through April 28, 2012.
Panero writes that Bush's "colors are battery powered. His paint application is luminous. His shapes are unashamed. Bush was an artist who came of age relatively late in his career, but he somehow managed to keep that long gestation from weighing him down. He was a mature painter who found a way to make playful and seemingly naive art."
