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Ryan Cobourn: Interview

Neil Plotkin interviews painter Ryan Cobourn on the occasion of the exhibition Ryan Cobourn: Crazy Nature at Fischbach Gallery, on view through May 25, 2012 .

Cobourn remarks: "It’s more about memory and being evocative, as opposed to painting details and specificity. I'm not really interested in specificity. I'm not really interested in how many petals are on a flower or what time of day it is. I’m not really interested in that. The paintings are more about the paint reflecting a notion or an idea. So, if like Matisse said, 'exactitude is not the truth', then something else has to be the truth, which is what painting really aspires to do."

Sangram Majumdar: Studio Visit

In a three part video interview, Haniya Rae visits the studio of painter Sangram Majumdar.

Of his recent work Majumdar remarks: "Being someone who works with a certain amount of observation and looking at things, I wanted to… compress a space I was familiar with through day to day interaction, like my studio, against a space that I'm familiar with more through memory… and try to pull those things together, literally… complicating within the painting a physically experience space and then a space that literally doesn't exist anymore."

MsBehavior

Sharon Butler visits the exhibition MsBehavior at the ArtBridge Drawing Room, New York, featuring work by Amy Feldman, Polly Shindler, Amanda Valdez, on view through June 28, 2012.

Butler writes: "All exponents of a casualist aesthetic, the three women rock insouciant shapes using monochromatic color, humble materials, and simple drawing techniques."

Additionally curator Jordana Zeldin states: "Be it on canvas or scratch paper, sturdy, near-primal shapes assert their right to take up space and interact, while the handling of materials, unsteady edges and uncertain compositions activate the work with energy, humor and disheveled charm."

Chuck Webster: Moving House

John Yau reviews the exhibition Chuck Webster: Paintings at ZieherSmith, New York, on view through May 25, 2012.

Yau writes: "The structure that Webster is here exploring is a stepped form that owes something to Navaho blankets. He uses a thick line to make the form’s border, appendages and interior lines. The thickness of the line confers gravity, as well as a sense of slow forcefulness... For all of its weight, the forms seem animated, as if they might pick up and move elsewhere. By focusing on one form, which he never repeats exactly, I got the sense that the artist is trying to consolidate what he knows and attempting to learn something else at the same time. Webster certainly knows how to make an interesting and often mysterious form, but he has seldom put it somewhere believable. Now it seems that he wants to expand the premise of his work, to go beyond the realm of mysterious things and make places where such things might exist."

Clare Price

A look at the work of Clare Price whose work is on view at studio1.1, London from May 18 - June 10, 2012.

Price's paintings are "inspired initially from drawings made on old antiquated computer programs. Marks are translated meticulously onto the canvas allowing for a grid-like structure to reveal itself. It's here that her process becomes interesting. Where control or loss of control opens the possibilities of paint and how this leads to a play with painterly concerns."

Dana Schutz: Piano in the Rain

James Kalm visits the exhibition Dana Schutz: Piano in the Rain at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, on view through June 16, 2012.

Kalm writes: "With this exhibition, the artist appears to be thinning down her paint, exercising a more virtuosic and slippery brush stroke, and striving for a fresher and more spontaneous style. Melding a goofy figuration with painterly abstraction, viewers are given a choice to appreciate the narrative or the process with which these pictures are fabricated."

Rita Ackermann: Fire by Days

Aimee Walleston talks to painter Rita Ackermann about her new series of work Fire by Days, on view in a solo exhibition at The Journal Gallery, Williamsburg (through June 3, 2012) and in the group show Mix/Remix at Luhring Augustine, New York (through June 9, 2012).

Walleston writes that Ackermann's "loose, understated abstractions are often rendered exclusively in indigo and red oil and enamel - newer works also include a nude tone - and touched by bursts of spray paint. The title of the series derives from 'Vacancy in Glass' by poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, whom Ackermann discovered through the writings of Antonin Artaud. The poem's final lines, 'In a swift white line/On a black space/A brushstroke/Signifying absence,' imply the flight of a bird as a symbol of loss, and reflect the artist's new impetus toward unbound, gesture-based abstraction."

Norman Bluhm: Coney Island Beauty

Charlie Finch visits Norman Bluhm's monumental painting Coney Island Beauty, recently installed at 499 Park Ave, New York.

Although Finch finds that the painting owes an "overwhelming debt to Pablo Picasso," he writes that "a doubling in the subject at hand restored, for a moment, to me, what is right about the painting, why I wanted to love it. The 'beauty' depicted, you see, could be that chubby wastrel on the shore, but also the billboard of some Botero-sized babe adorning the games of chance, like SkeeBall, on the Coney Island boardwalk itself. In this way, Norman Bluhm sprinkles that rarest of painterly qualities, humor, into his sparkling rolls of color and Picassoid line structure."