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 […]
Samuel Beckett and Painting
artcritical
Michael Coffey reviews Beckett’s Thing–Painting and Theatre by David Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press) Coffey writes: “David Lloyd, in his long-awaited book on Samuel Beckett and the visual arts, arrives, in his closing chapter, at this electrifying thought: ‘The political effect of Beckett’s work in general takes place not at the level of statement, but in […]
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, […]
Lois Dickson: A Playpen Within A Battlefield
artcritical
An essay by David Cohen on the paintings of Lois Dickson. Dickson’s exhibition New Worlds is on view at the New York Studio School through July 15, 2017. Cohen writes: “A ludic morphology lies at the heart of Dickson’s endeavor. Elaborations of shape and excavations of depth animate her pictorial intelligence in ways that are […]
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 […]
Markus Lüpertz @ Michael Werner
James Kalm Report
James Kalm visits Markus Lüpertz: New Paintings at Michael Werner Gallery, New York, on view through July 7, 2016. Kalm notes that this exhibition “presents over two dozen paintings from the past two years featuring the painter’s engagement with the Neo-Classic tradition. With a glancing nod to artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Pierre Puvis de […]
Janice Nowinski @ John Davis Gallery
Hyperallergic
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 […]
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits
The New Yorker
Zadie Smith profiles painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher is on view at the New Museum, New York through September 3, 2017. Smith writes: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character […]
Thaddeus Radell: Essays in the Epic
Painting Perceptions
John Goodrich reviews Thaddeus Radell: Hard Rain at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: “Throughout these paintings, the candid attempts and re-attempts to define each subject become, in effect, stories of their own: encapsulated histories of a transcendental quest. Radell’s work, in short, revels in the epic […]