Link to Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-seed/vonn-sumner-interview-somewhere-else_b_3275897.html
John Seed interviews painter Vonn Sumner on the occasion of the exhition Vonn Sumner: Somewhere Else at Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, on view May 18 - June 15, 2013.
Seed writes that Sumner's work "features a suite of paintings that form a kind of personal Commedia dell'Arte, whose main actor has a tragic, muted air. Sumner is wise enough to know how to engage you in his theater and also smart enough to stand back and let you react on your own terms. The paintings are generous, funny and just a bit opaque."
Sumner comments: "For me, the decisions in making a painting are largely intuitive. There is no literal idea or narrative I am trying to execute or illustrate. I can say generally that I work with materials and imagery that feel "right," and that I work toward an image that resonates with me at the time. I'm also interested in breathing new life into old conventions, like portraiture. With 'Reliquary' in particular, it felt both ridiculous/absurd and also somehow melancholic or mournful."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2013/05/14/hilary-harkness/
David Cohen reviews an exhibition of paintings by Hilary Harkness on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, through May 18, 2013.
Cohen writes that Harkness' "newer work dispenses with the assured absurdist humor of her trademark strategy and puts her in uncharted water in which human foible takes over from inhuman gesture. Meanwhile, the display of her cutaways of battleships, mansions, and even an auction house with their stylized, weirdly good-humored depravity confirmed to this now hardened fan (note the skepticism in the earlier reviews reposted below) her unexpected capacity to build distinct mood within each work despite the seeming ubiquity of her aesthetic and moral world view."
Link to Post:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/05/11/with-painter-jon-imber-nimble-shifts-capture-life-all-its-forms/y9ih3FLUTbIa9QBZx6A7IM/story.html
Sebastian Smee reviews a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Jon Imber at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York, on view through June 15, 2013.
Smee writes that Imber's paintings "have an unusually insistent pull — you feel something vital at stake...Imber has wrestled with different influences, different styles, and different subject matter all his life. The shifts, in his case, have felt less tectonic than nimble, supple, full of yearning and mischief. Life, in Imber’s paintings, unfurls with wayward force, like a thick, flicked rope. It takes on vital cadences. It laughs at itself, too."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/a-conversation-judy-glantzman/
Arthur Peña talks to painter Judy Glantzman about the work in her recent exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.
Glantzman comments: " I am looking for 'shorthand' symbols that speak of war. The large collages are very physical, so the intuitive process has a lot to do with tearing and layering. Chance plays a big part in the collages. I want the work to 'show me' so I often glue things together that happened to fall together on the floor. I think of the collages like a haiku, where the 'right' combination creates a perpetual dynamic. My definition of art is that the artist (me) creates a paradoxical dynamic that, like the yin and yang, perpetually goes back and forth. A space is made; like the white line that is made when you combine complementary colors or when opposite magnets resist each other... I want to build a back and forth that creates a feeling, and then I stop."
Submitted by Brett Baker on May 13, 2013
Nicolas de Staël at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York, on view from May 2 - 31, 2013.
In the United States, an eerie silence surrounds the work of Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. His name is rarely, if ever, recommended to or cited as an influence on an American painter. The first reason for his relative absence from the American consciousness is simply bad timing. As Eliza Rathbone explained in 1997: "The very fact that [de Staël] began to achieve fame and recognition during the same years as the New York School was establishing its reputation on native soil, made a challenging environment for the work of an artist steeped in artistic culture and traditions of France." 1 The romantic image of the New York School remains powerful today. Struggling inwardly in a studio on 10th Street continues to capture the imagination of young American painters more than painting light and heat on a beach in Antibes.
Nicolas de Staël, Paysage Méditerranée 1954, oil on canvas, 23 5/8 by 31 7/8 inches (courtesy of Mitchell-Innes and Nash)
Perhaps the main reason de Staël’s reputation has languished in recent decades, though, is the inaccessibility of his work. The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. has been the only reliable venue to see de Staël’s paintings in the last half century. After regular showings in the 1950s, only four other shows of de Staël’s paintings - in 1963, 1965, 1990, and 1997 - precede the small, but well-selected show of his works now on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s Madison Avenue space.
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/reviews/anthony-fisher-at-galerie-mourlot
Thaddeus Radell reviews the exhibition Anthony Fisher: Recent Works at Galerie Mourlot, New York, on view through May 20, 2013.
Radell writes: "Upon first viewing, these works could easily be interpreted as completely synthetic constructions conceived entirely by memory, imagination or some sort of narrative conception. Though Fisher does indeed use memory, he is essentially an artist devoted to direct observation, whether that entails following the decomposition of slabs of meat on a table, working from a live model or relentlessly studying a life-cast he had made of his favorite model and set up in his studio. That observation informs his work is witnessed by the solid drawing and the sculptural establishment of the planes describing the head or hands. The soundness of these planes is only surpassed by their intuitive diversity of shape and tone. The presence of a sitter is clear, yet elevated to a heightened poignancy through the insistence on working through the physical to a more profound representation of the psyche."
Link to Post:
http://www.artcritical.com/2013/05/10/elena-sisto/
Dennis Kardon reviews the exhibition Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow: Paintings by Elena Sisto at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on view through May 25, 2013.
Kardon begins: "Sentimentality, nostalgia, and illustration are the common pitfalls for a figurative painter undertaking to represent feeling and emotion — particularly when the imagery is invented and not photo derived. There is a huge payoff, however, for facing those risks head on. In her first New York show since 2004 and her debut with Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Elena Sisto takes as her subject the predicaments of young women painters as they embark on their calling. In images that Sisto, in the tradition of Philip Guston, originates from pure acts of painting, her self-critical perseverance has produced work that is unique, psychologically complex, and moving."
Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2013/05/alexi-worth-april-2013.html
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting visit the studio of painter Alexi Worth.
Worth discusses his recent work: " ...a few years ago I got very interested in the idea of nearness, things that are right up between your hand and your face, so… your own shadow, or an implication or suggestion of it, is designed to push that idea that you're there." He also comments on the technical decision to begin painting on nylon mesh, and the affect it has had on the work: "there's a kind of solid/void difference in the surface - the surface can collaborate with the illusionism."
Alexi Worth: States is on view at DC Moore Gallery, New York, through June 15, 2013.
Link to Post:
http://www.paintinginla.com/2013/05/one-painting-review-llyn-foulkes-pop.html
Lucy Chinen muses on Llyn Foulkes' painting Pop (1985-90) on view in the Llyn Foulkes retrospective at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles though May 19, 2013.
Chinen writes: "The expression of disgust towards American capitalism and immersive pop culture is not a particularly unique perspective in contemporary art, which is why it is rare when a work is able to communicate this feeling without being trite. Foulkes' stance does not come off as trite because it does not adhere to the currency of unique ideas within contemporary art. Foulkes adopts a narrative of tired resignation, illustrating himself with an intoxicated look in his eyes, a facial expression of vacant submission. The music emanating from the painting is darkly patriotic and carnivalesque. The domestic setting for an American dystopia is perfectly preserved in the diorama-like painting. Various styles converge in the work which plays with an exaggeratedly banal King of the Hill caricature, the grotesque thickness of a Phillip Guston painting, and the illusionistic qualities of Magritte."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/69690/durer-in-dc-some-observations-on-the-great-observer/
Thomas Micchelli reviews the exhibition Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints from the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through June 9, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Dürer’s boldness with his materials is evidenced in what is probably the most emblematic image to come from the Great Observer, namely 'The Great Piece of Turf' (1503)... The work is minimal in its color choices — tonal gradations of raw umber and mint green, with dabs of aquamarine and amber — and if you continue to look closely at it, raising your eyes inch by inch up through the weeds, it can seem like a dull profusion of busy green verticals. Take one step back, however, and the whole thing pulls together, not unlike a Jackson Pollock or a Joan Mitchell, with the blank backdrop suggesting a field of hazy, ambient light while simultaneously behaving as an undisguised paper support. The great piece of turf looks virtually collaged to that support, its dry densities of paint creating a hyper-real alternative reality to the paper’s all-too-real, blank tactility."
