Reviews
Rik Wouters: A Retrospective
Studio International
Julie Beckers reviews Rik Wouters: A Retrospective at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, on view through July 2, 2017. Beckers writes: “[Wouter’s] colourful work is characterised by authentic and touchingly simple depictions without hidden iconographical messages. … Wouters’ strive to develop a strong interest for light in his depictions succeeds in […]
Dana Clancy @ Alpha Gallery
Boston Globe Arts
Cate McQuaid reviews Dana Clancy: Sightlines at Alpha Gallery, Boston, on view through April 5, 2017. McQuaid writes: “[Clancy] transforms vitrines, windows, the glass surrounding the MFA’s courtyard, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s greenhouse into mirrors and lenses. Images bounce and bend, rippling through and transforming familiar places into enigmas…. Ordinarily, we parse experience […]
Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends
Evening Standard
Matthew Collings reviews Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on view through June 18, 2017. Collings writes: “[the show] … emphasises that [Hodgkin] would cling to subject matter as a taking-off point even though he always departed into abstract realms — but always returned as well, making it clear somehow that […]
Jennifer Coates: All U Can Eat
William Eckhardt Kohler: Huffington Post
William Eckhardt Kohler reviews Jennifer Coates: All U Can Eat at Freight + Volume Gallery, New York, on view through April 16, 2017. Kohler writes: “With wry humor and a sense of the absurd [Coates] finds these mythic energies embedded in some of the most degraded and cast off of places: the toxic and synthetic […]
Joan Mellon @ Carter Burden Gallery
Village Voice Arts
R.C. Baker reviews paintings by Joan Mellon at Carter Burden Gallery, New York, on view through March 23, 2017. Baker writes that “[Mellon’s] abstractions can evoke the sense of a searching, back-and-forth discussion — not to mention the occasional heated argument.”
A New Subjectivity: Figurative Painting after 2000
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews A New Subjectivity: Figurative Painting after 2000, curated by Jason Stopa, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York (through April 12). The show features works by Katherine Bradford, Katherine Bernhardt, Gina Beavers, Jackie Gendel, Liz Markus, and Rose Wylie. Butler writes that curator Jason Stopa “makes a strong case that contemporary painters, particularly […]
Painting on Message @ the 2017 Whitney Biennial
Hyperallergic
Jennifer Samet reviews painting at the The 2017 Whitney Biennial continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through June 11, 2017. Samet writes: “This year, the Whitney Biennial includes plenty of painting. And — for the most part — the painting is on message. It’s eccentric figuration with political content. Some […]
Mor Faye & Ernest Mancoba
New York Times
Holland Cotter reviews Mor Faye: The Untitled Series, Works On Paper, 1969-84 at Skoto Gallery (through March 18) and Ernest Mancoba at Aicon Gallery (through April 8). Cotter writes: “Stylistically, [Mor Faye’s] work is kaleidoscopic, the binder being its propulsive energy. This is fabulously inventive picture-making. I can easily imagine young painters delighting in it, […]
Lisa Adams: Petrichor @ CB1 Gallery
Artillery
Ezrha Jean Black reviews Lisa Adams: Petrichor at CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through April 9, 2017. Black writes: “Adams’ work has always reflected an acute sensitivity to the physical environment – both the macrocosmic view and its moment-to-moment experiential aspect. But above all she follows her own muse; and language – the poetry […]
Painting & Structure
AbCrit
John Bunker reviews the recent exhibition Painting & Structure at the Kennington Residency, London. The show featured works by Daniel Sturgis, Mali Morris, Sophia Starling, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Kes Richardson, and James Campion. Bunker writes: “This show brings together an interesting mix of painters who tend to ‘play’ with the tension between crafted excess and severe […]
Alex O’Neal: Hiding Places in a Dream
Two Coats of Paint
Katarina Wong reviews the recent exhibition Alex O’Neal: Hiding Places in a Dream at Linda Warren Projects, Chicago. Wong writes: “O’Neal tends to pack all of the action in the foreground of his paintings, so much so that it feels as if the air has been purposefully sucked out of the space. People and objects, painted […]
Petra Cortright @ 1301PE
LA Times
Christopher Knight reviews the recent exhibition Petra Cortright: quack doctor violet “saltwater fish” at 1301PE, Los Angeles. Knight begins: “Cortright’s paintings wedge themselves between the celebrated history of gestural art, mostly Expressionist and abstract, and the past generation’s frantic upheaval of established visual norms generated by the emergence and now ubiquity of digital imagery.”
Peter Halley: Paintings from the 1980s
Saturation Point
Piers Veness reviews Peter Halley: Paintings from the 1980s at Modern Art, London, on view through March 18, 2017. Veness writes that the paintings on view “[return] us to the familiar shapes, colours and textures of Peter Halley – the hard-lined geometry of Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit (1982), for example, with its characteristic […]
Ralph Coburn’s Random Sequence
New City Art
Stephen F. Eisenman reviews Ralph Coburn’s Random Sequence at the Arts Club of Chicago, on view through April 22, 2017. Eisenman writes: “what is most remarkable is that Coburn’s multi-section paintings incorporate choice: the owner-curator is expected to rearrange the parts as she wishes. The idea, which has its origins in Dada with Jean Arp […]
Elise Ansel: Dialogue
ARTnews
Alfred Mac Adam reviews the recent exhibition Elise Ansel: Dialogue at Danese/Corey Gallery, New York. Mac Adam writes: “Ansel investigates the ‘dialogues’ her paintings establish with the great masters … We can identify three moments in the gestation of Ansel’s version: first, her contemplation of the original in one form or another (in person, in […]
Victor Pasmore @ Pallant House Gallery
AbCrit
Robin Greenwood reviews Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, on view through June 11, 2017. Greenwood concludes: “… right from the off, his paintings show an interest in spatiality and volume, starting with the Cézanne-esque Bradman Still Life of 1929, which emphasises rounded three-dimensionality over planar flatness; and continuing right […]
R. B. Kitaj @ Marlborough Contemporary
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews R. B. Kitaj: The Exile at Home at Marlborough Contemporary, New York, on view through April 8, 2017. Yau writes: “B. Kitaj was passionately–one might almost say, defiantly–a literary painter. That was not a politic thing to be in the postwar art world, when abstraction became the mainstream and even most representational […]
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 […]
Cy Twombly @ the Pompidou
London Review of Books
Alice Spawls reviews works by Cy Twombly at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view through April 24, 2017. Spawls notes: “For all that his paintings groan under the weight of writing about them, and their own allusiveness (many feature lines of poetry or have ‘poetic’ titles), Twombly wasn’t an ideas artist. He disagreed with the […]
David Reed: Clarity of Facture
artcritical
James Hyde reviews the recent exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Hyde writes: “Part of the interest of the work, then and now, is how it distills painterliness. The schema is simple—each painting contains roughly a dozen horizontal bands of red or black alternating with white or off-white. The canvas […]