Link to Post:
http://aeqai.com/main/2013/05/gazes-and-shadows-continuity-and-change-the-return-to-figurative-painting/
Jonathan Kamholtz reviews the exhibition Continuity and Change: The Return to Figurative Painting, curated by Daniel Brown, on view at Cininnati Art Galleries through June 8, 2013. The show features works by Linda E. Anderson, Rob Anderson, Brian Burt, Tim Kennedy, Eve Mansdorf, Emil Robinson, and Aidan Schapera.
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.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://artnewengland.com/blogs/william-matthew-prior-thats-how-the-light-gets-in/
Monroe Denton reviews the exhibition Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, on view through May 26, 2013.
Denton writes that: "Prior’s works, which will be returned to various museums throughout New England this summer, raise questions about art in general, the idea of progress in art, the folk/high art distinction. When one looks at the museums holding the material, it is obvious that they are usually seen in isolation, as evidence of material culture (folk and historical societies), rather than esthetic achievement. ...In folk art, traditionally, we are accustomed to search for traces of the artist’s inner life; in high art, we believe we read the personalities of the sitters. The reversal of these priorities might be one reason folk painting suggests itself so well to modernism and post-modernism—the idea of the artist’s glyphic authority to express himself or herself as of greater interest than reading the substrata of the image."
Link to Post:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/apr/27/leon-kossoff-love-affair-london
Charlotte Higgins visits with painter Leon Kossoff on the occasion of the exhibiton Leon Kossoff: London Landscapes at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, on view from May 8 - July 6, 2013. The show will be on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York from November 5 - December 21, 2013.
Higgins writes: "It seems that Kossoff has frequently been drawn to landscapes that suggest a state of transition: either because they are undergoing literal change, such as the St Paul's building site; or because they are, like tube stations or railway lines, the zone of humans on the move. Christ Church, Spitalfields, which he painted for years, its facade looming monumentally, and miraculously (in his paintings at least) failing to topple despite itself, is a rare example of something that might be regarded as a 'view' in the conventional sense."
Link to Post:
http://art-rated.com/?p=1041
Rachelle Reichert interviews painter Amir Fallah on the occasion of Fallah's recent exhibtion The Collected at Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
Reichert introduces the conversation: "Inspired by Renaissance portraiture and vanitas paintings, Fallah’s paintings are engaging and intelligent. Working with themes of power and economics in the history of commissioned portraiture, Fallah constructs unique portraits featuring draped figures surrounded by personal mementos from the sitter’s home. There is an implied significance to the objects the sitters surround themselves with and serve as a face of identity." Fallah comments: " I wanted to paint a portrait of someone without having to do a literal portrait displaying male or female, young or old, all the basic things that describe a traditional portrait. I always cover the 90% of the body and their faces with their own belongings, be it with their duvet cover, their favorite shirt, a blanket, something from their home. I am creating a deconstructed portrait of who they are so usually it is a ghost of a figure with a couple of items."
Link to Post:
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/896095/video-the-phantasmatical-self-portraits-of-anne-harris
In a new video, painter Anne Harris discusses her approach to painting and the works in her current exhibition Phantasmatical: Self Portraits at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view through May 11, 2013.
Harris remarks: "These paintings, these particular paintings, came out of both something that was happening in the drawing that I worked on, and also something that I was experiencing. The experience of going from being a child and I think being oblivious, to being watched. But also you get older, you're not as ripe, you're not looked at. I thought it would be interesting to try and paint somehow that experience of both you're really exposed but you're not looked at." She continues: "These are paintings. I'm a starting point, but all the complexity that I have about my feelings about myself and how I interact with the world - I hope that's in the painting."
Link to Post:
http://www.nysun.com/arts/freilicher-and-friends/88283/
Xico Greenwald reviews the exhibition Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, on view through June 14, 2013.
Greenwald writes: "The offhanded, intimate approach adopted by Freilicher and some of her fellow painters belies the critically important contributions these artists made to the canon of twentieth century art. One of the works in the show, Pierrot and Peonies, 2007, pays tribute to French Rococo painter Antoine Watteau. Watteau’s friendships with players from commedia dell'arte informed his work, with troupe members posing in costume for paintings depicting human dramas. In Freilicher’s work, too, the artist has gone outside the art world for a creative exchange. Her friendships with New York School poets have deepened her relationship to her surroundings and the paintings here are richer for it."
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."
Link to Post:
http://mnaves.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/simple-but-not-so-simple-the-art-of-victor-pesce/
Mario Naves posts about the work of Victor Pesce on the occasion of an upcoming exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on view from April 20 - July 26, 2013.
Naves writes: "Victor Pesce paints pictures of simple things, but the pictures he paints are not so simple. Certainly, his still-life paintings are unadorned. A few pieces of fruit, a couple of bottles, a milk carton or coffee cup–that’s all he needs to pique his interest, to set the pictorial snowball rolling. These items are seen situated against flat expanses of dusky color, mottled fields which are, at the barest maximum, demarcated by a horizon line. Yet even without that line–that not-quite-Platonic table top–we read Pesce’s still-lifes as occupying space, as things that “sit.” It is with this nod to gravity that he lets us know that however spare–or, if you prefer, abstracted–his paintings may be, they are irrevocably of this world."
