Link to Post:
http://www.artnews.com/2013/04/24/contemporary-abstraction/
Pepe Karmel argues that we are now in the midst of a golden age of abstraction and suggests that linear analysis is no longer an effective method of evaluating abstract art. Instead, Karmel suggests the adoption of a super-set of "thematic" categories: "Three respond to nature: cosmologies, landscapes, and anatomies. And three respond to culture: fabrics, architecture, and signs. These categories are not mutually exclusive."
Karmel concludes: "Ultimately, the evolution of abstract art—like the evolution of modern art more broadly—has been a series of responses to the experience of life in the 20th and 21st centuries."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/11/artists-as-curators-stephen-truax.html
Sharon Butler blogs about the exhibition Love curated by Stephen Truax and presented by Art Blog Art Blog, on view at One River Gallery, Englewood, NJ, through December 21, 2012.
Love, featuring work by a diverse group of Brooklyn painters, celebrates the emotional attachment both painters and conceptual artists have for the medium, a 'love' that has returned painting to the "forefront of innovation in visual art." Butler writes that curator "Truax says the artists he has selected have 'a romantic and emotional engagement with painting and its history,' At the end of his essay, he even suggests that Conceptual artists are adopting painting as a strategy, too... Believing that all painting, no matter how seemingly intuitive, has conceptual underpinnings, Truax makes a case that the old saw "dumb like a painter" no longer applies."
The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue.
Link to Post:
http://pencilinthestudio.blogspot.com/2012/10/chris-martin.html
Maria Calandra visits the studio of painter Chris Martin.
Calandra writes: "Chris' paintings and drawings already seem to come directly and generously from his life, calling on both his memory and immediate reality. Sometimes he does this by merely hinting at a landscape that he has experienced and physically attaching images or objects he has come across to the canvas. Or, in other ways, he might do this more explicitly by paying homage to the things that are influential or important to him, as he paints an artist's or musician's name across the bottom of his canvases."
Link to Post:
http://www.burnaway.org/2012/05/more-than-painting-professionals-pant-at-the-contemporary/
Karen Tauches reviews the exhibition Painters Panting featuring works by David Diao, Craig Drennen, Saul Fletcher, Alex Hubbard, Judy Ledgerwood, Chris Martin, and Jennifer West at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, on view through June 24, 2012.
Tauches writes that "painters are the last great materialists in a world dematerialized by technology; they chose lifetyles which grow more eccentric with every passing year. They are ruled not by electronics, but by the physicality of materials—pigments, canvas, studio spaces, light, images made by hand and body. Either out of stubborn love of this tactical medium or a desire to be at the top of the pyramid, they are terribly dependent upon a class of people who can afford to keep and care for their wonderful, expensive, superfluous, and demanding two-dimensional objects."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/46817/chris-martin-mitchell-innes-nash/
John Yau reviews Chris Martin at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on view through March 3, 2012.
Yau writes: "The central thing that distinguishes Chris Martin from his forebears (Forrest Bess, Alfred Jensen, and Simon Gouveneur) is his meshing of visionary symbols and images derived from mass culture, particularly from the world of popular music... The other distinguishing feature is his slyly anarchic humor. (It's hard to imagine Forrest Bess telling a joke)."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2011/12/claude-viallat-exploring-casualist.html
Sharon Butler blogs about painter Claude Viallat and the Supports/Surfaces group in relation to contemporary painting.
Butler remarks that Viallat's work "strikes me as a precursor to the Casualist aesthetic... I find Viallat's relationship to the Casualist abstraction of artists such as Chris Martin, Rochelle Feinstein, Tatiana Berg, and Lauren Luloff fascinating."
Link to Post:
http://superdigit.blogspot.com/2011/10/staring-into-sun-chris-martin.html
Superdigit posts great installation images of the recently opened exhibition Chris Martin: Staring at the Sun at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, on view through January 15, 2012.
Link to Post:
http://glasstire.com/2011/10/17/forrest-bess-100-years-at-kirk-hopper/
Lucia Simek reviews the exhibition Forrest Bess 100Years: Paintings by Forrest and His Friends at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, Dallas, on view through October 23, 2011. The show includes paintings by Bess, Chuck Webster, Andrew Masullo, and Chris Martin.
Simek writes: "Bess's work is powerful in its preciousness - aching with an intensity and fervor of ideas that, even for its size, challenges the monolithic works by his AB EX contemporaries at the mid-century,when most of his works on view here were made. Certainly, because of their scale, and the crude handmade frames, Bess's work immediately reads in an intimate, spiritually-leaded way."
Link to Post:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/wake-up-call/
Nancy Princenthal reviews Chris Martin: Painting Big at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through October 23, 2011.
Princenthal asks: "Are these immersive fields of pure visual sensation, or narrative works meant to be considered, like conceptual art, at reading distance? Abstraction or figuration? Handmade originals or pastiches of photo-based imagery? Martin prefers both/and to either/or, an inclination that governs everything he does."
Link to Post:
http://youtu.be/dIX0dhb4M_Y
[VIDEO] James Kalm video blog of Chris Martin: Painting Big at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., on view through October 23, 2011. Kalm notes that Martin is "one of the artists that… refocused a lot of attention on painting, abstract painting, eccentric painting..."
