Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/portraiture-in-focus-irene-barberis-anita-taylor-and-helen-sturgess
Janet McKenzie considers the exhibition Portraiture In Focus: Irene Barberis, Anita Taylor and Helen Sturgess at Langford 120, North Melbourne, Australia (through April 21, 2013) in the context of post-war British portraiture and recent Australian art.
McKenzie writes: "With a revival of figurative art in the 1980s came a renewed interest in drawing, an art form that exists irrespective of cultural identity. The artists in Portraiture in Focus (2013): Irene Barberis, Anita Taylor and Helen Sturgess have achieved a significant profile in their careers, and have chosen drawing as one of their primary activitities, for here, the conceptual and the subjective, arguably the most vital components of contemporary art practice – connect in drawing more forcibly and more appropriately than in any other form of art."
Link to Post:
http://elisabethcondon.blogspot.com/2013/04/jenny-dubnaus-studio.html
Elisabeth Condon photo blogs a visit to the studio of painter Jenny Dubnau.
Condon writes that "[Dubnau's] portraits combine the best of Chardin and David (someone she thinks about often), with photographs staged by Jenny in the studio. The combination of air-borne facture and photographic portraiture yields strange perceptual resonance, slowing the rapid scan of visual data to a fleshy crawl."
Link to Post:
http://notesonlooking.com/2013/03/henry-taylor-at-blum-and-poe/
Geoff Tuck reviews an exhibition of paintings by Henry Taylor at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, on view through March 30, 2013.
Tuck writes: "Henry Taylor reveals much about human nature in [The 'We' Hours, 2012], as he does in other paintings in the show. Taylor challenges us to move beyond a reliance on recognizable types in contemporary representation, instead inviting us to trust our own judgment and to employ empathy. Like many artists who paint from life, Taylor drops faces and bodies he sees on the streets and among his friends into painted characters without regard to context...Taylor is always drawing and sketching people, and this shows in the work. Taylor is able to render a person exactly: with the slightest of means, using rough and gestural brush strokes, this artist imbues his figures and faces with ambiguity that is truly human."
Link to Post:
http://structureandimagery.blogspot.com/2013/03/painting-in-chelsea.html
Paul Behnke photo blogs visits to several painting shows on view in Chelsea in March, including: Andrew Masullo at Mary Boone Gallery (through April 27), Baker Overstreet: Frown Upside Down at Fredericks & Freiser (through March 30), Hope Gangloff at Susan Inglett Gallery (through March 23), and Al Held: Alphabet Paintings Cheim & Read (through April 20).
Behnke's photos demonstrate the wide range of painting, in both subject and scale, currently on view in New York.
Link to Post:
http://www.nysun.com/arts/long-looking-in-lancaster/88223/
Xico Greenwald reviews the retrospective exhibition A Formal Realist: The Works of John Dubrow at the Demuth Museum, Lancaster, PA, on view through May 19, 2013.
Greenwald writes: "Dubrow’s work amounts to a full-throated argument for the continued vitality of painting today... Westbeth View North, 2001-2005, is also a smashing work. Painted from a studio in The Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex on the far-west side of Manhattan, here the paint is troweled on like cement. The West Side Highway, reduced to a slab of grey, curves into a gorgeous arrangement of red and orange squares that live a double life: they are both light-filled depictions of buildings alongside the highway and a jaunty patchwork of color, completely satisfying as simply heavy, physical, bristly paint."
Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/manet-portraying-life
On the occasion of the exhibition Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy, London (on view through April 14, 2013), Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann examines the paintings of Manet and the failure of language to capture the "complex tying together of propositions, the psychological nuances and the suspension of time that characterise our experience of painting."
"Wrapped up in Manet’s complexity," Wiedel-Kaufmann concludes, "we are in awe of his poetic harmonies. Transported through a scene of daily life to an eternally balanced irresolution, a meditation on the process of vision and the mechanics of painting at once bound to and detached from the portrayal."
Link to Post:
http://paintingperceptions.com/landscape-painting/interview-with-lucy-macgillis
Larry Groff interviews painter Lucy MacGillis about her work.
MacGillis comments: "I always paint from life. In the landscape I remove and add where it works best for the painting, but I’m out there. The experience of being physically in the landscape I’m painting is important, the heat, the smells, the sounds of the nearby sheep, the train’s distant horn, the light. I’m convinced that it all plays into the feel of the painting and I react to all this. There is so much to see and the longer you look the more you find. I look for shapes, I forget what object I’m painting, just look and mix and put paint down... I like to simplify what I see, push it into abstraction. I make marks with the palette knife or a large flat brush. I scrape down a lot, mix strange greys, mixing compliments... I work on some paintings for months, others just happen in a couple of sittings. I enjoy the faster paintings most..see I’m painting this very sort of picturesque landscape here, I don’t want to make pretty paintings, so I’m looking at planes and color and trying not too get too hung up with insignificant details."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/anj-smith-at-hauser-wirth/
Nadiah Fellah reviews the exhibition Anj Smith: The Flowering of Phantoms at Hauser & Wirth, New York, on view through February 23, 2012.
Fellah writes that Smith's "paintings are at once radical explorations of identity and sexuality, fused with a painting practice that has its roots in a fifteenth-century aesthetic and technique, a striking contrast that invigorates her work. All of the eleven paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York are small, but painted in intricate detail. At times Smith’s brushstrokes are scarcely detectable as hairline traces across her canvases. In other instances her brushstrokes are not detectable at all, as she has seamlessly created porcelain complexions and diaphanous textiles using an oil technique only achieved by true painting masters. It takes the artist six to nine months to create each painting, but the complexity of each piece succeeds in creating scenes that are surreal and alluring, well worth her time-consuming efforts."
Link to Post:
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2013-02-04/matthew-watson-joe-sheftel/
Austin Considine reviews the exhibition Matthew Watson: Commission | Barter | For Sale at Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York, on view through February 24, 2013.
Considine writes: "For an artist to paint his professional circle might seem a bit cynical or wearisome in lesser hands. But the images' layers of commercial transparency add fresh complexity. Perhaps more important, Watson's portraits are rendered with such pathos and precision that their human subjects are compelling without the context. To an outsider unaware of who these subjects are, they could just as well be anyone's circle of acquaintances-a yoga instructor, boss or rich, flamboyant aunt. The clearest reference point for Watson is the painstakingly refined work of pre-modern portraitists, who painted the nobility of their day on commission. The social landscape has changed in the centuries since, but it hasn't eradicated class or patronage... Adding to the layers, Watson incorporates works by other artists in several of his subjects' surroundings. If each portrait is rooted in a transaction, it is merely one transaction in an infinite chain."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/64173/riffing-off-symmetry-a-conversation-with-susanna-coffey/
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Susanna Coffey.
Asked about the variety of subject matter in her work Coffey comments: "I am just moving through the range of genres – still life, figuration, and landscape... Most artists follow their work wherever it leads. They follow their muse or their duende... I’m like the most traditional person in the world, and I am really interested in the genres! I like that connection to the past that the traditional genres provide. People are moving away from tradition and the weight of history, and I’d rather bear that weight and feel it. Even though everything has been done, it hasn’t been done by me. And particularly for women artists, it is not a very long tradition. The culture in the United States is also not that old. So I don’t want to throw it off; I want to get engaged with history, and fight with it, and compete with it."
