Reviews
Eleanore Mikus @ Craig F. Starr
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Eleanore Mikus: Tablets and Related Works, 1960–69 at Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, on view through March 25, 2017. Yau rites: “[Eleanore Mikus] brought together nuance and structure, making them into a subtly captivating experience… she is clearly uninterested in the perfection we associate with the Minimalist aesthetic, and with artists […]
Ruth Pastine @ Brian Gross
Squarecylinder
David M. Roth reviews Ruth Pastine: Witness at Brian Gross Gallery, San Francisco, on view through February 25, 2017. Roth writes: “Ruth Pastine’s supersaturated color-field paintings unite two seemingly contradictory characteristics: sensuality and remoteness. How might that work? Smashingly well, as it turns out. The Ojai-based artist blends vertical bands of strong color into gradients […]
Sean Scully @ Timothy Taylor Gallery
Saturation Point
John Stephens reviews the recent exhibition Sean Scully: Horizon at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. Stephens writes: “I’d say [Scully] owes his success over the decades since the 70s not only to his deft and confident handling of paint but also to his understanding, not just of modernist abstraction but of the history of Western painting. […]
Henri Fantin-Latour @ the Musée du Luxembourg
Hyperallergic
Joseph Nechvatal reviews Henri Fantin-Latour: À fleur de peau at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, on view through February 12, 2017. Nechvatal writes: “Henri Fantin-Latour’s 19th-century Realist paintings … remind us that the real must be processed through the flesh and the blood of our eyes. In his early, clear-eyed (yet lovely) paintings that celebrate […]
Lee Lozano @ KARMA
Art in America
Eric Sutphin reviews a recent exhibition of paintings by Lee Lozano: c. 1962 at KARMA, New York. Sutphin writes: “The recent exhibition at Karma offered an important and illuminating look at Lozano’s rarely seen early work, from around 1962 … The paintings here (all untitled) can be read as studies made on the path toward […]
Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s
The New Yorker
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through May 14, 2017. “Starting in the late nineteen-seventies, young American artists plunged, pell-mell, into making figurative paintings. That seemed ridiculously backward by the lights of the time’s reigning vanguards of flinty post-minimalism, cagey conceptualism, […]
Marjorie Welish: Some Differences
ARTnews
Barbara A. MacAdam reviews Marjorie Welish: Some Differences at Art 3, New York, on view through February 5, 2017. MacAdam writes: “What is most surprising in this gathering is the personal, physical quality of the works. They seem to mimic breathing, inhaling and exhaling between the vacant areas and the more expansive blue mounds. Sometimes there’s a […]
Francis Picabia @ MoMA
Too Much Art
Mario Naves reviews Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on view through March 19, 2017. Naves concludes that the exhibition “is an attempt at promoting Picabia up the totem pole of great artists in the cause of revamping the Modernist ‘narrative.’ As played out […]
Emily Mason @ Ameringer McEnery Yohe
Hamptons Art Hub
Peter Malone reviews paintings by Emily Mason at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, New York, on view through February 7, 2017. Malone observes: “Though Mason’s palette is keyed to the higher pitches, it avoids the flash and punch embraced by much recent abstract painting. Apparently not interested in deadpan statements or the lure of eye-candy, she creates […]
John McLaughlin: The Marvelous Void
artcritical
Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron review two exhibitions: John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through April 16) and John McLaughlin: Marvelous Void at Van Doren Waxter, New York (closed). The reviewers write: “[McLaughlin] sought a purer basis for abstraction in the Zen concept of the ‘marvelous […]
Mimi Gross: In Her World
Art in America
Dan Nadel profiles painter Mimi Gross who designed the sets and costumes for Douglas Dunn + Dancers: Antipodes at Danspace Project, New York, February 2–4, 2017. Nadel writes: “Gross told me that she is guided by a ‘fanaticism for Titian,’ which is to say, she builds compositions from planes of color. No matter how casual, […]
Dan Walsh @ Paula Cooper
Art Observed
D. Creahan reviews works by Dan Walsh at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, on view through February 4, 2017. Crehan writes: “Artist Dan Walsh’s work draws on process as a mode of transcendence, working through canvases through a series of evolving forms and rule-based approaches to the canvas space. The artist … draws on repetitive, […]
Suzanne Blank Redstone: 1960s Portal Paintings
Art Agenda
Leigh Markopoulos reviews the recent exhibition Suzanne Blank Redstone: 1960s Portal Paintings at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. Markopoulos writes: “Featuring primary-colored geometric forms and grids, [Redstone’s] compositions instantly evoke Piet Mondrian, at the same time hinting at a venerable tradition of European pre-war geometric abstraction of the sort practiced by Jean Hélion. While her experiments […]
James Ensor @ The Royal Academy
Elizabeth Fullerton reviews the recent exhibition Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Fullerton writes: “In his curation, Tuymans has played down the cliché of his countryman as a romantic outcast. The show’s sixty-six paintings, drawings, and prints primarily from Ensor’s productive early career include satirical images, landscapes, intimate portraits, […]
Mark Rothko: Dark Palette
ARTnews
Alfred Mac Adam reviews the recent exhibition Mark Rothko: Dark Palette at Pace Gallery, New York Mac Adam observes: “The act of superimposing black on color ironically transforms the surface into a mirror that enables viewers to seek and lose themselves in the work. The paintings invite speculation, and speculation generates dynamic narrative, going “on […]
Ken Weathersby: From Sculpture to Painting
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Ken Weathersby; Time After Time at Minus Space, Brooklyn, on view through February 25, 2017. Butler writes: “Weathersby seems to be reminding the viewer that abstract paintings may seem formalist, or, to some viewers, simply decorative, but they are in fact part of a larger timeline rooted in history, politics, and philosophy. […]
Ed Clark @ the Tilton Gallery
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Ed Clark: Paintings at the Tilton Gallery, New York, on view through February 18, 2017. Yau writes: “Clark’s approach is simple and straightforward, and he has not altered it much over the years. I don’t think he needs to. I think what needs to happen is to bring together in an exhibition […]
Vanessa Bell @ the Dulwich Picture Gallery
The Guardian
Lauren Elkin previews Vanessa Bell: 1879-1941 at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. The show will be on view from February 8 – June 4, 2017. Elkin concludes: “Bell’s art countered symbolism with intense sensuality and a celebration of the tactile. The explosive beauty of the surface takes us back to the material of the work, […]
Martin Johnson Heade @ the Milwaukee Art Museum
New City Art
Chris Miller reviews Nature and Opulence: The Art of Martin Johnson Heade at the Milwaukee Art Museum, on view through February 26, 2017. Miller writes: “Heade joined the mid-century enthusiasm for exploring biological and geological diversity. He traveled to South America to paint landscapes and exotic hummingbirds. His ornithological designs don’t reach the ornate intensity […]
Etel Adnan @ the Institut du Monde Arabe
Flash Art
Martha Kirszenbaum reviews a recent exhibition of works by Etel Adnan at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. Kirszenbaum concludes: “Throughout this intimate retrospective, Adnan’s voice, both feminist and pacifist, reveals itself through her interwoven influences, languages and techniques. She observes her itinerancy, from Smyrna to Beirut, and from Sausalito to Paris, with a generous […]