Narrative

Susanna Coffey: Interview
The Studio Visit

John Mitchell interviews painter Susanna Coffey whose exhibition Crimes of the Gods is on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, through June 30, 2018. Coffey recalls: “I began to paint self-portraits from observation in order to be a better teacher. To learn about, not a subject, but rather a process of making, […]

Robert Birmelin: Interview
Painting Perceptions

An engaging conversation between painters Larry Groff and Robert Birmelin. Asked about how he “[leads] the viewer’s eye through your paintings in unexpected ways” and evoking “visual surprise,” Birmelin comments: “I’m interested in movement, in the transient moment of noticing. In the eye as it selectively focuses within a changing, often overloaded environment… I was […]

Rose Wylie @ the Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Studio International

Joe Lloyd reviews Rose Wylie: Quack Quack at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, on view through February 11, 2018. Lloyd writes: “There is another tension in Wylie’s work, between intentionality and spontaneity… Wylie’s work thrives on memory’s entropy, on the way we organise the floating odds and ends of our minds. Human, all too human, in […]

R.H. Quaytman: Interview
Apollo Magazine

Lidija Haas interviews artist R.H. Quaytman whose exhibition An Evening, Chapter 32 is on view at the Secession, Vienna through January 21, 2018. Haas writes: “[Quaytman] has never once considered abandoning painting, ‘because I think it’s really the best problem in art. The plane, the picture, is the best, deepest problem.’ Photographs on the other […]

Graham Nickson: Light and Geometry
Hyperallergic

Karen Wilkin reviews Graham Nickson: Light and Geometry at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on view through December 22, 2018. Wilkin writes: “The canvases and watercolors [Nickson] has produced over the years — of flamboyant sunrises and feverish sunsets — address themes that most committed modernists would either scorn or find too frightening to tackle. […]

Dana Schutz: Building the Boat While Painting
The Nation

Barry Schwabsky reviews an exhibition of works by Dana Schutz at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and subsequently reflects on Schutz’s controversial painting of Emmett Till shown in the recent Whitney Biennial. Schwabsky observes: “It’s in the gap between what can be imagined and what can be represented that art’s capacity for surprise is […]

Thomas Trosch @ Fredericks & Freiser
Art in America

Eric Sutphin reviews the recent exhibition Thomas Trosch: Paintings: New And Old at Fredericks & Freiser, New York. Sutphin writes: “Trosch has mastered the art of suggestion: one gets a sense of the ages and affects of the figures through dashes and globs of paint. He accomplishes the difficult task of marrying subject matter and […]

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Painting is Presence
The Nation

Ratik Asokan reviews Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s recent exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher at the New Museum, New York. Asokan observes: “For a portraitist, it’s a strange approach. But perhaps we aren’t dealing with portraiture. Abstract painting, as defined by Octavio Paz, ‘suggests contemplation to us—not of what it shows but of a presence which the colors and […]

Painting’s Place: Susan Lichtman at Steven Harvey

Susan Lichtman’s paintings engage representation and abstraction, and bring a novel female perspective to Intimist iconography.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits
The New Yorker

Zadie Smith profiles painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher is on view at the New Museum, New York through September 3, 2017. Smith writes: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character […]

Thaddeus Radell: Essays in the Epic
Painting Perceptions

John Goodrich reviews Thaddeus Radell: Hard Rain at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: “Throughout these paintings, the candid attempts and re-attempts to define each subject become, in effect, stories of their own: encapsulated histories of a transcendental quest. Radell’s work, in short, revels in the epic […]

Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive
Art in America

Blog post featuring Linda Nochlin’s 1980 article re-published on the occasion of Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, on view at The Jewish Museum, New York, through September 24, 2017. Nochlin writes: “… one might well raise some questions about conventional notions of an art of social concern itself, especially as these have recently been articulated in […]

Sandro Chia at Marc Straus
Brooklyn Rail

Jonathan Goodman reviews a recent exhibition of works by Sandro Chia at Marc Straus Gallery, New York. Goodman writes: “It is hard to read Chia’s inclination for forthright feeling in an environment like ours—dominated by the market and mostly biased against a recognizable awareness of art history. In contrast, in a painting such as Looking […]

Inside Out: Henry Taylor’s Painting
Art in America

Tatiana Istomina profiles painter Henry Taylor whose work is included in the The 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through June 11, 2017. Istomina begins: “Henry Taylor’s painting has often been discussed in the context of outsider art not only because of his vivid and somewhat reductive figuration, […]

Jordan Kasey: Strangely Lit and Shadowed Paintings
Hyperallergic

Dennis Kardon reviews Jordan Kasey: Exoplanet at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, on view through March 12, 2017. Kardon writes: “The force that drives the engine of Kasey’s work is her eschewal of the flat-earth ideology (collaged, cartoony or photo-derived, super-flat figuration) of many of her contemporaries. Although sharing formal explorations with older painters like […]

Tirtzah Bassel: Interview
Open House

Debbi Kenote and Til Will interview painter Tirtzah Bassel whose work was recently on view with Slag Gallery at the Volta Art Fair, New York. Bassel comments: “… a lot of times the images in my paintings start from just an everyday situation that you would kind of see anywhere, right, at this point. You’re […]

David Humphrey @ Fredericks & Freiser
Two Coats of Paint

Jonathan Stevenson reviews David Humphrey: I’m Glad We Had This Conversation at Fredericks & Freiser, New York, on view through February 25, 2017. Stevenson begins: “David Humphrey’s visual and intellectual virtuosity – augmented by the smooth surface finality of meticulously applied acrylic paint – is such that he seems to accomplish everything he wants in […]

Sandro Chia @ Marc Straus
James Kalm Report

James Kalm visits an exhibition of new paintings by Sandro Chia at Marc Straus Gallery, New York, on view through April 2, 2017. Kalm notes: “In this, his first major show with Marc Straus Gallery, [Chia] shows a group of recent paintings, many featuring single figures accompanied by animals. Chia’s masterful feel for the painter’s […]

Claire Tabouret @ Night Gallery
EatingPaintingSmoking

Jason Ramos reviews Claire Tabouret: Eclipse at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through March 4, 2017. Ramos writes: “Half-way between the vibrant exuberance of Rebecca Campbell’s images and Luc Tuyman’s clinical stroke-by-stroke reproductions lay the gliding, neutral toned figures of LA based French painter Claire Tabouret… The figures in the larger works and monoprints […]

David Hockney: Pool Paintings
Apollo Magazine

Matthew Sperling writes about David Hockney’s pool paintings. A retrospective of works by David Hockney will be on view at Tate Britain from February 9 – May 29, 2017. Sperling writes: “… on arrival in California … one particular feature of the architecture, previously only seen in black and white photographs, struck Hockney with fresh intensity… […]