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9 Women and Abstraction @ Zürcher Gallery
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Thomas Micchelli reviews 1970’s: 9 Women and Abstraction at Zürcher Gallery, New York, on view through December 22, 2016. The show features works by: Lula Blocton, Regina Bogat, Samia Halaby, Hermine Ford, June Leaf, Lizbeth Marano, Kazuko Miyamoto, Lynn Umlauf, and Merrill Wagner. Micchelli writes: “In her highly informative essay on the exhibition’s website, curator […]
Outside In: 5 Painters @ Steven Harvey
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John Yau reviews Outside In at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, on view through December 31, 2016. The show features works by Andrea Belag, Susanna Coffey, Elliott Green, Stephanie Pierce, and Eleanor Ray Yau writes: “I am thankful for the nameless sensations and wild associations these paintings stirred up. The pleasures they offer are real, […]
Matisse/Diebenkorn @ the Baltimore Museum of Art
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Barry Nemett reviews Matisse/Diebenkorn at the Baltimore Museum of Art, on view through January 29, 2017. Nemet concludes: “Blurring distance and time, both men unapologetically embraced their aesthetic kindred spirits across oceans and ages, and brought them home. While passions enter artists’ studios, immaculate conceptions don’t. Connections, which give birth to creation, are at the […]
Alex Katz: Interview
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Jennifer Samet interviews painter Alex Katz. Katz remarks: “So many things can be great subject matter. I could be looking at Nefertiti, and that could be something I see today. But it also could be movies and billboards and TV. I think everything in our culture is potential subject matter. You go into these areas […]
Brenda Goodman @ Jeff Bailey Gallery
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John Yau reviews an exhibition of works by Brenda Goodman at Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through December 18, 2016. Yau concludes: “One of the beauties of Goodman’s painting is its refusal to settle for the immediately legible. By making work that can be read as either abstract or figurative, she invites viewers […]
Max Beckmann in New York
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Jennifer Samet reviews Max Beckmann in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through February 20, 2017. Samet writes: “Clearly, what New York gave Beckmann was not superficial subject matter, but inspiration in the form of energy. His painterly style, developed and refined out of four decades of working, became […]
Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins
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John Yau reviews Merlin James: Paintings For Persons at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., on view through November 12, 2016. Yau writes that James “gets at all sorts of feelings without ever locking them into a narrative. He doesn’t tell us how to read his paintings. He gives us that responsibility and, in that regard, he is […]
Don Voisine’s Universe of Shapes
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John Yau reviews Don Voisine: X/V at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine, on view through October 28, 2016. Yau writes: “Voisine’s pieces demand attention; you need to study them up close and from a distance to fully appreciate the illusions the artist creates by way of a handful of shapes and a […]
Gregory Amenoff: Eclectic Mysticism Rooted in Modernism
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John Goodrich reviews Gregory Amenoff: New Paintings at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view through October 29, 2016. Goodrich writes: “While the natural landscape, exotic and enveloping, underpins all of Amenoff’s scenes, they depart from boiler-plate realism by several routes. A number of especially romantic paintings are notable for their brushy, atmospheric depths; they depict more-or-less […]
Florine Stettheimer: Feminist Provocateur
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Barbara Bloemink considers painter Florine Stettheimer’s important, but often overlooked, contributions as a feminist. Bloemink writes: “Stettheimer never painted ‘fantasies’ — her works are all based on factual, thoroughly researched details — and her style and subject matter were carefully chosen. She prophetically chose to portray unique subjects, including race, sexual orientation, gender, and religion, in […]
Rhetorical Abstraction in the Age of the Incidental Viewer
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Gwenaël Kerlidou reflects on the work of Frank Stella. Kerlidou writes: “Stella’s main argument boils down to this: How to make paintings that don’t lose the status of paintings by becoming objects — paintings that evacuate the subjectivity of both the painter and the viewer, and replace it with historical necessity? But, by rejecting expression, […]
Glenn Goldberg @ Charlie James
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Daniel Gerwin reviews Glenn Goldberg: Somewhere at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through October 15, 2016. Gerwin writes: “As I stood among his paintings, I became physically aware of a subtle conflict between sensual thrill and intellectual restraint… In ‘Okay (Blue)’ a rubber ducky shares the foreground with a highly stylized vertical stalk […]
Gary Petersen @ McKenzie Fine Art
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John Yau reviews Gary Petersen: Back There Behind the Sun at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on view through October 16, 2016. Yau writes: “Gary Petersen’s skewed geometric paintings call forth analogies to music and architecture, a realm of vertical intervals and diagonal supports spliced into a precarious balance… His off-center, stacked shapes have a […]
Kyle Staver @ Kent Fine Art
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John Yau reviews paintings by Kyle Staver at Kent Fine Art, New York, on view through October 22, 2016. Yau concludes: “By introducing a touch of comedy, Staver opens up well-known myths and stories, making them more human than lofty. Wit, tenderness and empathy inform her views of the tragic, suggesting that we are not […]
Clintel Steed @ Steven Harvey
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John Yau reviews Endymion: Recent Paintings by Clintel Steed at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through October 9, 2016. Yau writes: “Steed strokes the paste-like paint onto the surface, creating an uneven tactile skin that is pebbled and brushy. This tactility is at odds with our digital world – its endless barrage […]
Joan Semmel: Interview
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Clarity Haynes interviews painter Joan Semmel on the occasion of the Semmel’s exhibition of new work at Alexander Gray Associates, New York, on view through October 15, 2016. In the introduction Haynes writes: “For her new exhibition … Semmel has created 12 large paintings, many of which have two layers, each with a nude self-portrait. […]
Elisabeth Condon @ Lesley Heller Workspace
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Edward M. Gómez reviews Elisabeth Condon: Bird and Flower at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on view through October 16, 2016. Gómez writes: “To produce her latest canvases, Condon has experimented with some new approaches that, in effect, have made the production of her variety of abstraction as much the subject of these new works […]
Etel Adnan’s Vibrant, Visual Poems
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Maria Howard reviews Etal Adnan: The Weight of the World at the Serpentine Gallery, London, on view through September 11, 2016. Howard writes: “[Adnan’s] paintings evoke sheer joy, their style unpretentious, not naive but innocent, at odds with her poetry and writings that bear witness to the violence of the world. They may seem like […]
André Masson’s Automatic Drawings
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Joseph Nechvatal reviews André Masson dans l’antre de la métamorphose at Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris, on view through July 31, 2016. Nechvatal writes: “An expanded field of subjects pervades the visual lexicon of Surrealism, but Masson is generally considered to have pioneered the automatic drawing technique with an opulence that borders on the decadent. Masson’s […]
The Existential Experience of a Chardin Still Life
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John Goodrich blogs about viewing Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Seville Orange, Silver Goblet, Apples, Pear and Two Bottles (1750) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Goodrich writes that “the painting provides something of an existential experience. For more conventional artists, painting representationally means starting with a recognizable enough rendering and then adding the ‘art’: suggestive […]