Dorothea Rockburne: In Conversation
Lauren Henkin and Richard Benari interview artist Dorothea Rockburne about her work and career. Rockburne on space: "It seems to me that the big changes in art, if you want to think about it, are spatial changes, they’re not changes in subject matter. Subject matter, still life, geometric abstraction, the human figure, more or less, […]
Etel Adnan @ Callicoon Fine Arts
Bansie Vasvani reviews an exhibition of works by Etel Adnan at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, on view through May 23, 2014. Vasvani writes: "For Adnan, place is paramount to her work. The unspeakable beauty of the Bay Area, and specifically the city of Sausalito where she lives, is captured in her block-like compositions. Two […]
Modern Art and St Ives 1915-1965
Jackie Wullschlager reviews the exhibition International Exchanges: Modern Art and St Ives 1915-1965 at Tate St Ives, on view through September 28, 2014. Wullschlager writes that show explore connections between the St. Ives painters whose work engaged with "[l]andscape, light, the lure of the local" and their international contemporaries such as Georges Braque. She notes: […]
Dexter Dalwood: The Interzone
Sarah Hegenbart considers the paintings of Dexter Dalwood. Hegenbart writes: "Dalwood aligns with Cézanne in the way in which he intermarries objects and references, but transforms the musicality that resonates in Cézanne’s work into a cold rational über-structure, creating an objectivity via external perspective of things, almost like a view from the interzone. Dalwood’s work […]
Lisa Corinne Davis on Niccolo di Pietro
Lisa Corinne Davis considers Niccolo di Pietro's Saint Ursula and Her Maidens (c. 1410) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Davis writes: "Unfolding within the painting’s rectangle is a figure that acknowledges the plane while suggesting but never becoming a volume. Ursula is unable to move forward or back, in or out. […]
Staring at the Sun @ Saltworks
Eric Hancock reviews the exhibition Staring at the Sun, curated by Craig Drennen, at Saltworks, Atlanta, on view through June 14, 2014. The show features works by Eleanor Aldrich, Jane Fox Hipple, Bonnie Maygarden, and Lauren Silva. Hancock writes: "The exhibition’s comparison of painterly abstraction’s tenuous historical progress and the sun’s eventual destruction of the human […]
Alan Davie: Space & Spontaneity
Robin Greenwood considers the paintings of the late Alan Davie (1920–2014). Davie's work is on view at four London venues: Portland Gallery (through June 5), Alan Wheatley Art and Gimpel Fils (both through May 23) and Tate Britain (through September 28). Greenwood concludes: "Davie’s best paintings don’t simplify, they gain complexity as they go; they […]
Pierre Soulages: Painter of Black & Light
Robert C. Morgan reviews an exhibition of works by Pierre Soulages at Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin, New York, on view through June 27, 2014. Morgan writes that Soulage's "earlier paintings contain overlapping black and umber brushwork at vertical, horizontal, and diagonal angles, holding forth shimmers of light – discreet underpinnings of ochre and yellow […]
Joann Gedney: Magnificent Obsession
Alessandro Cassin reviews the recent exhibition Joann Gedney: Magnificent Obsession, The Early Paintings, 1948–1963 at Rox Gallery, New York. Cassin writes that the show "generously covers more than a decade of the early years of Gedney’s oeuvre, a period during which her work fluctuated between the two initially conflicting directions endlessly debated at Phillip Pavia’s […]
Painting @ Pulse New York
Jonathan Stevenson blogs about painting on view at the 2014 Pulse New York Contemporary Art Fair. Stevenson reports: "While the trend towards abstract painting observed of NADA was perhaps gently in evidence at Pulse, the work presented by the fifty or so exhibitors there was more varied and less cohesive… there was plenty of abstraction, across […]
Arnold Mesches: In Conversation
Richard Benari posts a podcast recording of painter Arnold Mesches in conversation with Robert C. Morgan, Irving Sandler and Michael David on the occasion of the recent exhibition Arnold Mesches: Eternal Return at Life on Mars Gallery, Bushwick. Mesches comments: “What was going on [in the early 1950s] was an awareness of the technique of […]
Shirley Kaneda & Robert Mangold
David Carrier considers two exhibitions: Shirley Kaneda: Space Without Space at Galerie Richard (through May 28) and Robert Mangold at Pace Gallery (closed). Carrier writes: "A great deal of contemporary art mimics advertising images, which seek to deliver a potent visual punch all-at-once. The abstract paintings of Shirley Kaneda and Robert Mangold – a very […]
Rodney Dickson: Studio Visit
James Kalm visits the studio of painter Rodney Dickson. Kalm notes: "Obsessively building up oil paint, Dickson creates these works with an unflagging intensity and a faith in paint itself. Sometimes weighing in at over one hundred pounds these works become fetishized objects that transcend the normal limitations of graphic images."
Dan Perfect & Fiona Rae
Andy Parkinson reviews the exhibition Painter, Painter: Dan Perfect, Fiona Rae at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, on view through July 6, 2014. Parkinson writes that in Rae's work "the digital seems to be referenced more in the synthetic colours and the insertion of manufactured collaged elements from childish popular culture, girly stationery, stickers […]
Bay Area Painters: Energy Without Grandiosity
Xico Greenwald blogs about the exhibition Five West Coast Artists: Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Neri, Park, and Thiebaud at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, on view through July 13, 2014. Greenwald writes that the show highlights "a tight-knit group of Bay Area painters and sculptors spent the following decades making abstract and figurative artworks that […]
Michael Berryhill: Interview
Nathlie Provosty interviews painter Michael Berryhill about his work on the occasion of his exhibition Beggars Blanket at KANSAS Gallery, New York, on view through June 14, 2014. Berryhill comments: "What’s exciting to me is being a little bit lost and then finding meaning; finding my way out of being lost is so palpable. And […]
Wayne Thiebaud: Painting & Memory
Artillery
Vonn Sumner writes about the work of Wayne Thiebaud on the occasion of the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: American Memories at the Laguna Art Museum, on view through June 1, 2014. Sumner observes: “The more traditional and honest Thiebaud tries to be, the more radical his work becomes. In this age of ever-shortening attention spans, he […]
Chaim Soutine: Luminous Writhing Paint
David Carbone reviews the exhibition Life in Death: Still Lifes and Select Masterworks of Chaim Soutine at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, on view through June 14, 2014. Carbone writes: "Soutine remains an outsider to the mainstream narrative of Modernism; he belongs instead to the still largely unwritten alternative history of modernist figurative painting. Well […]
Olivier Mosset: Inhabiting Space
Peter Scott writes about the work of Olivier Mosset. Scott notes: "Resolutely inhabiting the space within which they’re exhibited, the paintings of Olivier Mosset often seem inseparable from the architecture of the gallery or museum within which they’re presented. Occasionally employing a scale and format reminiscent of the Hudson River School painters Church and Bierstadt, […]
Chris Martin: Cool Drink on a Hot Day
Alexander Koch reviews the exhibition Chris Martin: Cool Drink on a Hot Day at Kow, Berlin, on view through July 27, 2014. Koch writes that Martin "makes art’s transcendental and animist ambitions profane. The presence of landscape, good music and good sex, a starry night and a person’s death, colors and shapes on a surface […]