Reviews
The Dazzling Sweep of the Hunter Color School
Hyperallergic
Thomas Micchelli reviews Radiant Energy at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, on view through May 13, 2018. Micchelli begins: “Radiant Energy is both the title and the most succinct descriptor of the exhibition bringing together, for the first time, the paintings of Gabriele Evertz, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld, key members of the […]
Jennifer Coates: Lullabies for Difficult Times
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Jennifer Coates,: Correspondences at Freight + Volume, New York, on view through April 15, 2018. Butler writes: “At first glance, the paintings convey a sense of joy, in the same way that Paul Klee’s idiosyncratic visual language does. Yet in some, like Bull Spirit(2018) and Small Rabbit Spirit(2018), globs of slathered paint, […]
Trevor Winkfield’s Undomesticated Imagination
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Trevor Winkfield: Saints, Dancers and Acrobats at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, on view through March 25, 2018. Yau writes: “Modest in scale, rigorous in execution, mysterious and aloof in outcome, Winkfield’s invented forms tell us that all is not lost, that capitalism does not yet own our imagination — that […]
Josef Albers: Bauhaus in Mexico
New York Review of Books
J. Hoberman reviews Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through March 28, 2018. Hoberman writes that the exhibition “makes Albers’s appreciation [of Mexico] evident, juxtaposing his studies, typically drawn on graph paper, with both his finished artwork (mostly paintings, one lithograph) and his fastidious arrangements of tiny on-site photographs. Serially organized […]
Designing Women: Kurt Kauper at Almine Rech
Margaret McCann reviews an exhibition of works by Kurt Kauper at Almine Rech.
Joanne Greenbaum: Structure and Flow
Big Red & Shiny
Liza Bingham reviews Joanne Greenbaum: Things We Said Today at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, on view through April 7, 2018. Bingham writes: “The abstract paintings in the Anderson Auditorium, all untitled, are ultimately nothing if not self-portraits, of a kind. They reveal Greenbaum’s compulsive drawing practice, writ large on […]
Thomas Nozkowski @ Pace Gallery
Brooklyn Rail
William Corbett reviews an exhibition of paintings by Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through February 15, 2018. Corbett writes that Nozkowski’s paintings “have a cheerful and clear engagement with their world. They do not ask to be read or figured out. They belong to that strain of twentieth century American painting […]
Fragonard’s Merry Company
New York Review of Books
Colin B. Bailey writes about Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures recently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bailey writes that the show “[celebrates] the thirty-seven-year-old Fragonard as a practitioner of ‘pure painting’—an action painter avant la lettre. His rainbow palette is ‘parrot colored’—to use a term that was applied to Renoir in the heyday of […]
John Walker: At the Edge of Land and Water
artcritical
Wendy Gittler reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush recently on view at the New York Studio School. Gittler writes: “Walker’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout his long career he has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Goya, Constable, Turner and […]
Byron Kim’s Painting Ritual
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Byron Kim: Sunday Paintings at James Cohan Gallery, New York, on view through February 17, 2018. Butler writes: “What makes [Kim’s paintings] unremarkable are their size and the undramatic skies they depict – not the complex, sublime sky paintings made by, say, great Dutch painters like Aelbert Cuyp and Jacob van Ruisdael. Instead, they are […]
Laura Owens: Art in Free Fall
New York Review of Books
David Salle writes about the work of Laura Owens on the occasion of a recent mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Salle writes: “Owens’s paintings are squarely in the middle of a postmodern aesthetic that’s been gaining momentum for the last ten or fifteen years. It […]
Cézanne Portraits: Relentless Intimacy
London Review of Books
T.J. Clark reviews Cézanne Portraits on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London (through February 11) and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. from March 25 – July 1, 2018. Clark writes: “Certainly the idea that Cézanne’s approach to picture-making is essentially technical and ‘objective’, locked in a painter’s preserve … is useless. It offers […]
Sensate Wisdom: Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough
Through the decades Desiderio’s “sensate wisdom,” the unique visualizing capabilities Alberti ascribed to painting, have persevered, balanced with a savvy contemporary approach to subject.
Pat Adams @ Victoria Munroe Fine Art
artcritical
Anne Sherwood Pundyk reviews Pat Adams: Then Found at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, New York, on view through January 27, 2018. Pundyk writes: “The works in Then Found span the years 1997 to 2016. This is only a third of the more than six decades Adams has spent building her extensive body of perceptual, non-figurative, mixed media work. […]
Christian Bonnefoi: Taking the Painter Out of Painting
Hyperallergic
Gwenaël Kerlidou writes about the work of Christian Bonnefoi. Kerlidou writes: “Bonnefoi’s strategies seem to condense a few aspects of the work of his American contemporaries: the objectification and theatricalization of a gesture devoid of pathos of David Reed; the deconstructing strategies of Jonathan Lasker — even if Lasker’s use of exaggeratedly thick brushstrokes seems […]
Watteau’s Eloquent Formalism
Painting Perceptions
John Goodrich visits Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings from the Thaw Collection and shares his observations about Watteau’s striking formalism. Goodrich writes: “Superficially, Watteau is all fanciful froth – charming subject matter, feathery modeling, a light, darting touch. But what distinguishes Watteau are his extraordinary and comprehensive intuitions about formal rhythms — in this case, […]
Laura Owens: The Sky Is the Limit
ARTnews
Phyllis Tuchman reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Tuchman writes that Owen’s recent abstract works “are bold, handsome works that exemplify how a new wave of artists is approaching the making of abstract paintings. Instead of appropriating, say, […]
Laura Owens: Moving Targets
Art in America
Nancy Princenthal reviews a mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Princenthal writes: “What critics offer often in defense of abstract painting amounts to proclaiming its unique sincerity—the argument is that good painting is, perhaps singularly, unironic in its quest for transcendent […]
John Walker @ the New York Studio School
Arte Fuse
Jonathan Goodman reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush at the New York Studio School, on view through January 21, 2018. Goodman writes: “The directness of Walker’s abstractions, highly patterned in their composition and emotionally direct, claim our attention by virtue of their immediacy and their freedom from pretense. Walker seems to have internalized […]
Ryan Crotty @ High Noon Gallery
Hyperallergic
Stephen Maine reviews Ryan Crotty: Never the Less at High Noon Gallery, New York, on view through February 4, 2018. Maine writes: “To the extent that Crotty’s work is about the fluid movement of color across the surface, it can be viewed in terms of Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler […]