Reviews
Helen Frankenthaler @ the Clark Institute
Hyperallergic
Thomas Micchelli reviews As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings (through October 9), and No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts (through September 24). Both exhibitions are on view at at the Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Micchelli writes that both exhibitions “offer a compact, revelatory, and frequently stunning look at an artist whose reputation has been all too often yoked […]
Painting’s Place: Susan Lichtman at Steven Harvey
Susan Lichtman’s paintings engage representation and abstraction, and bring a novel female perspective to Intimist iconography.
Camille Pissarro: The Perennial Student
New York Review of Books
Julian Bell reviews two exhibitions: Camille Pissarro: Le premier des impressionnistes at the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (through July 16) and Pissarro à Éragny: La nature retrouvée at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (through July 9). Bell writes: “Nearly always, Pissarro composes poems about passing light that can be mapped intelligibly, letting you know just […]
Frank Bowling: Interview
Apollo Magazine
Imelda Barnard interviews Frank Bowling on the occasion of Bowling’s exhibition Mappa Mundi at Haus der Kunst, Munich, on view through January 7, 2018. Barnard writes: “‘The possibilities of paint are never-ending,’ Frank Bowling tells me… Bowling’s persistent urge to reinvent painting has led him to experiment with elaborate procedures – stitching, staining, pouring, dripping, spilling. […]
Unlimited: Painting and Political Upheaval
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Unlimited: Painting in France in the 1960s & 1970s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Butler writes: “The incisive, elegantly installed exhibition in Philadelphia, comprising work made from 1964 through 1974, highlights some of the ideas that were percolating before and after the 1968 riots. Artists began to consider how they were using […]
Ellen Berkenblit @ Anton Kern
New York Review of Books
Dan Nadel reviews paintings by Ellen Berkenblit recently on view at Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Nadel writes: “In defiance and celebration of the earthen black that surrounds them, the vigorously delineated horses, flowers, hands, faces, stripes, a nude, and a foot found in Ellen Berkenblit’s striking new paintings at Anton Kern Gallery are a […]
Gillian Ayres @ National Museum of Wales
London Review of Books
Julian Bell reviews an exhibition of works by Gillian Ayres on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff through September 3, 2017. Bell writes: “The huge canvases Gillian Ayres painted during the 1980s rush at you like Atlantic breakers. Bursts of orange, viridian, scarlet, yellow and cyan tumble forward and engulf you; convulsions of oil […]
Aspects of Abstraction @ Lisson Gallery
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Aspects of Abstraction at Lisson Gallery, New York, on view through August 11, 2017. The show features works by Leon Polk Smith, Paul Feeley, Joanna Pousette-Dart, and Marina Adams. Yau writes: “The exhibition’s circumspect title makes no grand or inclusive claim. It brings together four diverse artists from different generations who share similar tendencies… Frankly, I […]
Fahrelnissa Zeid @ Tate Modern
Studio International
Emily Spicer reviews an exhibition of works by Fahrelnissa Zeid at Tate Modern, London, on view through October 8, 2017. Spicer writes that in Zeid’s painting Resolved Problems (1948), “[figuration] drops away entirely. This is a joyously coloured canvas of gestural shapes that seem to jostle in front of your eyes. Red is the dominant colour, a hot, […]
Richard Smith: Work of Five Decades
AbCrit
John Bunker reviews Richard Smith: Work of Five Decades at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, on view through July 15, 2017. Bunker writes: “To point to and paraphrase Matisse … he said the first line that an artist makes as she/he begins a drawing is in fact the 5th as there are already the four […]
Milton Avery’s Unique American Modernism
Apollo Magazine
Matthew Sperling reviews Milton Avery at Victoria Miro, London, on view through July 29, 2017. Sperling writes: “In Excursion on the Thames (1953), one of several pictures in the exhibition deriving from Avery’s only trip to Europe in 1952, the perfect balance is struck between loving observation of the everyday and visionary form-making: the pleasure […]
Wayne Thiebaud @ White Cube Mason’s Yard
Studio International
Matthew Rudman reviews Wayne Thiebaud: 1962 to 2017 at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, on view through July 2, 2017. Rudman writes: “What this exhibition makes clear is not simply Thiebaud’s longevity, with works on show dating from 1962 to 2017, but the sustained quality, experimentation and sense of play in his output … Portraits […]
Peter Shear @ the Fortnight Institute
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Peter Shear: Magnolias All at Once at the Fortnight Institute, New York, on view through July 16, 2017. Yau writes: “Shear is interested in composition, color relationships, how forms sit within the rectangle of the canvas, what can be done with the edges, and the texture of paint… There is something wonderfully […]
Ellsworth Kelly: Last Paintings & Plant Drawings
Art Observed
D. Creahan reviews Ellsworth Kelly: Last Paintings and Plant Drawings at Matthew Marks Gallery, o view through June 24, 2017. Crehan writes: “Alongside his body of paintings, Matthew Marks is also exhibiting a series of Kelly’s Plant Drawings, a long-running series of graphite and ink drawings made as observations of the natural curves and lines of […]
Mark Tobey: Threading Light
The New Criterion
Mario Naves reviews Mark Tobey: Threading Light at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, on view through September 10, 2017. Naves writes: “‘Threading Light’ is a superb exhibition. Sensitively paced and keenly selected, the exhibition underscores painterly and metaphorical continuities, all the while tracing a development that, though not without hiccups, is streamlined and, until the […]
Matisse: The Joy of Things
New York Review of Books
Claire Messud reviews Matisse in the Studio at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on view through July 9, 2017. Messud writes: “this glorious exhibition impresses the viewer also with simpler, more atavistic and abiding truths: Matisse’s passion for color, for light, for pattern, for flowers and the female figure; and his conviction—borne out in […]
Ginny Casey: Built From Broke at Mier Gallery
Ginny Casey paints forms that she would have made if she weren’t a painter, and places them in spaces that are not of this world.
Mike Solomon @ Berry Campbell Gallery
Hamptons Art Hub
Peter Malone reviews Mike Solomon: Immediate Splendor at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, on view through July 8, 2017. Malone begins: “Mike Solomon’s pictorial space appears familiarly limited in the traditional modernist sense, but is dominated by a persistent blur. Viewers are left with the odd feeling of being kept just outside of an event […]
Philip Guston: A Painter and His Muses
The Art Section
Deanna Sirlin reviews Philip Guston and The Poets at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, on view through September 3, 2017. Sirlin concludes: “[Eugenio] Montale writes of his own poetry, ‘The subject matter of my poetry . . . is the human condition considered in itself.’ Whether one is looking at the earliest period of Guston’s pictorial works, […]
Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave
Evening Standard
Matthew Collings reviews Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave at the British Museum, on view through August 13, 2017. Collings concludes: “Hokusai believed every year of working improved his ability and he would have to get to 100 before he really hit the peak. At 75 he wrote modestly and with comic particularity that it was […]