Paul Klee and The Naked Perhaps
Alana Shilling reviews the exhibition Paul Klee: Making Visible at Tate Modern, on view through March 9, 2014. Shilling writes: "The reason the works in Klee’s oeuvre can neither fully inhabit a fixed past nor prove a reliable augur of developments to come, resides in the fact that they rebel against the fixity of a […]
Sue Williams @ 303 Gallery
Sharon Butler blogs about the exhibition Sue Williams WTC, WWIII, Couch Size at 303 Gallery, New York, on view through February 22, 2014. Butler writes: "Without the prompting of [the show's title] few viewers would apprehend Sue Williams’s richly evocative new color field paintings as what they are: crazed essays on life in the time […]
Turner & Frankenthaler: Making Painting
Emyr Williams reviews the exhibition Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW at Turner Contemporary, Margate, on view through May 11, 2014. Williams writes: "The two artists are represented by paintings and watercolours. In fact, water is one clear link between them: the way it carries colour, extending its reach into the corners, lapping against the […]
Laini Nemett: Studio Visit
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting visit the studio of painter Laini Nemett. Asked about combining disparate views in a single painting, Nemett comments that she wants the composite imagery to "conjure memory" but also to emulate experience of place. "We constantly have all these images and all these places that are shooting through our minds" […]
Silke Otto-Knapp: Monday or Tuesday
George Vasey reviews Silke Otto-Knapp: Monday or Tuesday at the Camden Arts Centre, London, on view through March 30, 2014. Vasey writes: "Atypically for a painter, Otto-Knapp creates images through a subtractive rather than additive approach, building up and dissolving washes of watercolour and gauche on primed canvas. Paint sits in the tooth of the […]
Amy Sillman: Parts & Labour
Matt Saunders interviews painter Amy Sillman about her work. Sillman comments: "I have several different registers of drawing. First comes big thickets of abstract marks, what Deleuze calls ‘asignifying traits’, through which I try to locate something, some weight or presence. Into this comes a kind of semiotics, when I’m drawing an image, but it’s […]
7 New York Shows
James Panero reviews a selection of current and recent New York exhibitions including: Sideshow Nation II: At the Alamo at Sideshow Gallery (through March 3), Paperazzi III at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery (through February 15), Clouds, organized by Adam Simon, at Lesley Heller Workspace, Eight Painters at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Lori Ellison at McKenzie Fine […]
Power of Three Small Paintings
Peter Malone writes about three small paintings from three current New York shows: Walter Buckner: Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art (through February 8), Susanna Coffey: Elemental at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through February 9), Lois Dodd: Recent Paintings at Alexandre Gallery (through March 1). Malone writes that while visiting these shows he […]
Jane Freilicher in Chicago
Chris Miller reviews Jane Freilicher: Paintings at Valerie Carberry Gallery (through March 15) and Jane Freilicher: A Painter Among Poets at The Poetry Foundation, Chicago (through February 21). Miller quotes Freilicher: "To strain after innovation, to worry about being ‘on the cutting edge’—a phrase I hate—reflects concern for a place in history or for one’s […]
Jost Münster, Dominic Beattie & Alice Browne
Sam Cornish reviews three exhibitions in London: Jost Münster: Together for Now at Tintype Gallery (closed January 25), Dominic Beattie: Albeit at Fold Gallery (through February 22), and Alice Browne: In Place at Limoncello Gallery (through February 8). Cornish begins noting that all three artists are "trying to find a way around modernist abstraction, or […]
Lucy Mink @ Giampietro Gallery
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy talk with painter Lucy Mink at her exhibition it's got me, it's got you at Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT, on view through February 22, 2014. The press release notes that Mink's "work is an abstract diary that illustrates how she is consumed daily by combinations of color and form. […]
Tony de los Reyes @ Angles Gallery
Christopher Knight reviews the exhibition Tony de los Reyes: rio grande/rio bravo at Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through February 22, 2014. Knight writes that "for the last two years, Tony de los Reyes has been developing a quirky group of abstractions with exactly that distinctive — and distinctly political — edge. Color and […]
Daniel Levine Talks Monochrome
Noah Dillon talks to painter Daniel Levine about monochrome painting on the occasion of Levine's exhibition The Way Around at Churner and Churner, New York, on view through February 22, 2014. Dillon writes that Levine "said, only half-facetiously, that, 'To start with, the decision to make a monochrome painting is a bad decision. And everything […]
The Burden of Content
Altoon Sultan blogs about her transition from painting complex landscapes to smaller, more abstract works. Sultan writes: "I wanted to get closer to 20th century reductive abstraction, which I love. But that's only part of the story: I also wanted to get out from under the heavy burden of content, the meaning––environmental, sociological––of those paintings… […]
Moira Dryer @ Eleven Rivington
Jerry Saltz reviews works by Moira Dryer at Eleven Rivington, New York, on view through February 22, 2014. Saltz writes: "Dryer used stripes, drips, dots, and squiggles, tropes and motifs that even then were a half-century old. (And are the configurations painters today are still using.) Yet her shaped, strange paintings, sometimes with wavy edges, […]
Lori Ellison: In Conversation
Ashley Garrett interviews painter Lori Ellison whose work is on view at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, through February 15, 2014. Asked about scale in her work, Ellison quotes from an essay she wrote on "humility and making small work." She notes: "If one is lucky, Small Art goes directly to the heart. For this […]
Outside In @ Life on Mars
Etty Yaniv reviews the exhibition Outside In at Life On Mars Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through March 1, 2014. The show features works by Katherine Bradford, Farrell Brickhouse, James Castle, Thornton Dial, Chris Martin, Joan Snyder, and Fred Valentine. Yaniv writes: “Viewing these radically different artists side by side brought to life the question, […]
Joe Warrior Walker: Interview
Susie Pentelow interviews artist Joe Warrior Walker. Walker comments: "Finding the balance [between figuration and abstraction] is the key and the hardest part of resolving a work. The push and pull between abstraction and figuration is a core element to the ambiguous aesthetic of the work and it comes down to an intuitive series of […]
Janice Nowinski: Interview
Maria Doubrovskaia interviews painter Janice Nowinski about her work. Asked about making paintings after masterworks Nowinski remarks: "I strongly maintain that no painting and no painter has become irrelevant. I do not believe that we move past the issues that they have investigated. I believe that my role is to continue and add my voice to […]
Gordon Moore: On Dimensionality
Lauren Henkin talks to painter Gordon Moore on the occasion of his exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on view through February 8, 2014. Moore discusses dimensionality in painting: "The suggestion of an element of dimension or illusion in painting has been interesting to me for some time simply because it was considered as […]