Abstraction

McArthur Binion: Ghost: Rhythms

Alan Pocaro reviews the exhibition McArthur Binion: Ghost: Rhythms at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, on view through June 22, 2013.

Pocaro writes: "Binion’s larger, more rural works... stand out. These misty-toned 'Circuit Landscapes Nos. V and VI' are freer in their deference to the Modernist grid, retaining the more ridged works’ austere coloration but with enhanced emotional purchase. Like ethereal heirloom quilts on antiseptic walls, they hang unpretentiously without stretchers... By maintaining an ongoing dialogue with his roots in the agrarian south, Binion’s paintings are largely symbolic, achieving a spiritual resonance that defies the typically reductive materialism associated with East Coast minimalism. "

Painterly Pasted Pictures

Brendan Dooley reviews the exhibition Painterly Pasted Pictures at Freedman Art, New York, on view through May 18, 2013.

Dooley writes that the exhibtion "brings together a group of collages from the 20th century united by the stylistic trait of 'painterliness.' ... Though painterliness obviously has its roots in painting, this exhibition shows how easily and successfully the concept can be applied to other mediums; painterliness is, in a sense, materiality, which is why collage – the mixing of different materials and forms – seems to be one of the best mediums to demonstrate this visual effect."

Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions

John Yau writes about the exhibition Sanford Wurmfeld: Color Visions 1966 – 2013 at the Hunter College/Times Square Gallery, New York, on view through April 30, 2013.

Yau notes: "Wurmfeld’s deep historical research in the field of color theory is unrivaled. He is, in that regard, both a painter and a scholar, a combination the art world distrusts. Formalist academics and critics have spent years cleaving thinking from craft, believing the latter to be obsolete and unnecessary, rather than a matter of necessity and urgency... It is impossible to enumerate all the different things that Wurmfeld does with color, and all the effects he achieves, from an optical buzz to a kind of luminous fog that seems to float in front of the surface — something that J. M. W. Turner and Agnes Martin get in some of their work."

Greg Goldberg: Color of Light

Mary Negro visits the studio of painter Greg Goldberg on the occasion of the exhibition Greg Goldberg: Northern Light at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York, on view April 17 - May 31, 2013.

Negro begins: "There is a welcoming demeanor to Greg Goldberg’s bright, airy Manhattan studio that compliments his own as he places canvas after canvas on the wall and explains his process. He observes how color changes with different light throughout the day. The linen texture of his square oil paintings gives each piece a natural grid structure as he slowly builds the compositional architecture of each work. Combining loose, geometric blocks with sweeping, gestural brush strokes, the dynamic and free form shapes are applied with a veiled precision. This apparent ease actually emerges from intense deliberation about what colors should be placed next to another, and how the moods of different parings harmonize or develop tension."

Steve Wheeler: Close to a Prophet

After visiting the recent exhibition Steve Wheeler: The Oracle Visiting the 21st Century at David Findlay Jr. Gallery, David Brody and Drew Lowenstein discuss the art and lasting influence of painter Steve Wheeler.

Brody remarks that Wheeler "always had fans –– the work’s sheer persistent quality keeps it alive. As the wheel of poetic injustice turns, Wheeler now begins to seem, to many contemporary artists, more directly relevant than the canonical New York School artists. Art history pinches back on itself all the time –– particularly American art history, in which, for example, the dogged conservatism of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Burchfield, or Edward Hopper becomes avant-garde in retrospect."

Brody continues, noting that "[Wheeler] packs signs into a resolute, atomic-age aesthetic crush, then works the variables of color and linear hierarchy into critical mass. A plurality of contemporary painters have used a similar strategy, for example Pearson, Burckhardt, and Murray; they get to abstraction by submitting found objects, or found fragments of style, to enormous pressure. This additive, sign-saturated version of abstraction, not invented by Wheeler but pushed to a limit case by him, allows many contemporary painters to manifest, like Wheeler, a quality of true belief in painting, above and beyond artistic ideology. Yes, we respond to Wheeler because he is a believer, and more than that –– something close to a prophet."