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Patrick Berran @ Chapter NY
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Stephen Maine reviews works by Patrick Berran at Chapter NY, on view through October 28, 2017. Maine writes: “All works are untitled, done in acrylic and toner on panel, and dated 2017. The fine points of Berran’s complex technique are probably not relevant, but it may be helpful to know that the gel transfers and […]

Brenda Goodman Cuts Deep
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John Yau reviews Brenda Goodman: In a New Space continues at DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary, Bushwick, Brooklyn through October 1, 2017. Yau writes: “Goodman renders the border between abstraction and representation meaningless. The internal sectioning of her forms invites us to categorize what we are looking at, even as they resist succumbing to that dominance. In the nearly […]

Suzan Frecon: The Pleasures of Slow Paintings
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John Yau reviews Suzan Frecon: recent oil paintings at David Zwirner Gallery, New York, on view through October 21, 2017. Yau writes: “I think of Frecon’s shape as an abstract thing, a form that defies being turned into language or a message. I think her resistance to the tendency to easily convert her art into […]

Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction
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Karen Emenhiser-Harris reviews Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, on view through September 17, 2017. Emenhiser-Harris writes: “According to the Kemper, this is the first museum exhibit in the US to show abstract artwork created exclusively by women of color. Stylistically varied and teeming […]

John Walker @ the Center for Maine Contemporary Art
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Chris Crosman reviews John Walker: From Seal Point at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, on view through October 29, 2017. Corsman writes: “Walker is an unrepentant modernist who has led a resurgence — mostly through uncompromising example — of painters reinvigorating abstraction by looking to nature, ideas, emotion and, especially, place. The Seal Point […]

Gabriele Evertz & Sanford Wurmfeld @ Minus Space
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John Yau reviews Gabriele Evertz/Sanford Wurmfeld: Polychromy at MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, New York, on view through August 12, 2017. Yau observes that the two artists’ “work is very different from each other, demonstrating that the ontology of color is a wide-open field — a space where research, color theory, and painting can arrive at very […]

Richard Gerstl @ the Neue Galerie
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Angelica Frey reviews works by Richard Gerstl at the Neue Galerie, New York, on view through September 25, 2017. Frey writes: “Gerstl was a polarizing figure, a ‘neurotic Narcissus’, as co-founder of the Leopold Museum, Diethard Leopold defined him … Gerstl perfectly embodied the artistic and existential turmoil of Vienna in the last years of […]

Fernand Léger @ Centre Pompidou-Metz
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Joseph Nechvatal reviews Fernand Léger: Beauty Is Everywhere at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France, on view through October 30, 2017. Nechvatal notes that he “[prefers] Léger’s work when it points at neurocomputing wetware, biorobotics, and AI-charged automation; when it hums away in the space between the mechanic and the organic. This is when Léger functions as a […]

Helen Frankenthaler @ the Clark Institute
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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 […]

Emily Cheng: Interview
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Jennifer Samet interviews painter Emily Cheng. Cheng remarks: “A lot of what I’m painting doesn’t exist in the visible world. So, to capture its enormity and its suggestive power, you have to be able to go into your imagination, which is not always cooperative. You pull out what you can from it. I want to […]

Aspects of Abstraction @ Lisson Gallery
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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 […]

Peter Shear @ the Fortnight Institute
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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 […]

Janice Nowinski @ John Davis Gallery
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John Goodrich reviews Janice Nowinski: Paintings at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: “In her third show at John Davis Gallery, Nowinski continues to combine a distinctly ‘low,’ unpolished approach with high ambitions for painting. The artist’s fairly conventional motifs — figures posed in landscapes and interiors […]

Merrill Wagner: Works from the 70’s
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Thomas Micchelli reviews Merrill Wagner: Works from the 70’s at Zürcher Gallery, New York, on view through June 24, 2017. Micchelli writes: “Merrill Wagner’s remarkable tape paintings are as much head games as they are inquiries into precision and chance. Trying to puzzle them out is akin to reverse-engineering a ship in a bottle: even […]

Anne Harvey @ Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects
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John Yau reviews Anne Harvey: Private Life at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through June 11, 2017. Yau writes: “Harvey’s observational paintings were described by John Ashbery, in 1966, as ‘the probing anguish of an almost Jamesian dissecting eye.’ Ashbery went on to state: “A curious anxiety, tempered by the exhilaration […]

Mercedes Matter @ Mark Borghi
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Jennifer Samet reviews Mercedes Matter: A Survey: Paintings & Drawings from 1929 to 1998 at Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York, on view through May 26, 2017. Samet writes: “Matter’s insistence on the nude female body, and on still lifes of flowers, drapery, and skulls as the focus of observational painting — for herself and […]

Patricia Satterlee’s Painterly Silence
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Thomas Micchelli writes about the paintings of Patricia Satterlee whose exhibition Already Gone is on view at the Martin Art Gallery of Muhlenberg College, PA, through May 26, 2017. Micchelli writes: “These forms are limitlessly varied and undeniably strange… Satterlee puts these motifs through their formal paces — rotating and mirroring them; reducing them to […]

Shawn Thornton’s Intricate Cosmos
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John Yau reviews Shawn Thornton: Pareidolia at CUE Art Foundation, New York, on view through May 24, 2017. Yau concludes: “Thornton has likened his work to a “cosmos of small tantric paintings that come together as anthropomorphic circuit boards.” In a number of the paintings, he overlays these circuit boards onto his self-portrait, so that […]

Roger Bissière, The Last “Primitive”
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Gwenaël Kerlidou considers the work of Roger Bissière. Kerlidou writes: “With [Bissière’s] disappearance, a whole chapter of Modernism, one that we could call the ‘Primitive Paradigm,’ came to a close. The end of the primitive model in Modern art also signaled the emergence of what would later be called the Postmodern. While, in the typical […]

Albert Oehlen: Interview
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Jennifer Samet interviews painter Albert Oehlen on the occasion of his exhibition Elevator Paintings: Trees at Gagosian Gallery, New York, on view through April 15, 2017. Oehlen comments: “I decided to make painting, but I wasn’t coming from painting in the sense of needing to hold a brush and smear paint. Rather, it was a decision, […]