Rackstraw Downes Paints West Texas
An new video documents painter Rackstraw Downes painting on site in Presidio, Texas. Speaking about his attraction to the area Downes comments: "I'm interested in landscape where people have acted upon it. I grew up in a landscape like that. England is very lived upon… The American romance with the untouched landscape is foreign to […]
Jordan Broadworth: Studio Visit
Paul Behnke visits the studio of painter Jordan Broadworth. Behnke writes: "Broadworth's layred, evocative pieces present multiple takes on the figure / ground relationship as isolated segments blur or refine depths of field. The focus is constantly shifted. between planes and layers, the hard edge and the liltingly biomorphic. The employed grid combines with a […]
Reginald Marsh: Thirties New York
John Haber reviews the exhibition Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York at the New York Historical Society, on view through September 1, 2013. Haber writes: "Although [Marsh] learned his bulky forms at the conservative Art Students League, where Kenneth Hayes Miller and Guy Pene de Bois tempered their Modernism with reverence for the past, Marsh […]
Surfacing
Kathryn McKinney reviews the exhibition Surfacing at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco, on view through August 30, 2013. The show features paintings by Matt Mignanelli, Dominic Paul Moore, and Russell Tyler. McKinney writes that all three artists work "in a formal manner that takes an uncomplicated approach to the medium, with an emphasis on […]
Cora Cohen: Formative Formlessness
Samuel Jablon interviews painter Cora Cohen about her work. Cohen comments that her "curtain and drawing paintings… begin with the act of seeing, when things are first glimpsed, before logic and rationality take over. The uncertainties I experience in seeing filter into them. They are informed by my unsureness of what I have seen and what […]
Mapping the Abstract
Dan Coombs reviews the exhibition Mapping the Abstract at Beers Lambert Gallery, London, on view through September 21, 2013. The show features paintings by Benjamin Brett, Blake Daniels, and Robert Fry. Coombs writes "The works in this exhibition try and capture some of [Guston's] directness, that rawness. The battles that are being waged in the […]
Charline von Heyl: In the Abstract
Diane Solway profiles painter Charline von Heyl. Solway writes: "Known for her bold, enigmatic, unapologetically abstract paintings, von Heyl has long made a distinction between looking and seeing. Her works are not abstractions of real things in the world; they are a riot of images that she discovers while improvising on the canvas, a process […]
NYC Summer Painting Shows
In a series of three posts, Elisabeth Condon photoblogs a number of summer painting shows in New York including: Summer Session at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, and works by Mary Corse from a Summer Group Show at Lehman Maupin (Post 1), Endless Summer at Brian Morris Gallery (Post 2), and Reinventing Abstraction at Cheim […]
Graham Sutherland: Exultant Strangeness
Robin Blake reviews the exhibition Exultant Strangeness: Graham Sutherland Landscapes at Abbott Hall Gallery, UK, September 18, 2013. Blake writes: "Sutherland’s working method in landscape was to seize on a detail such as a boulder, a dead tree, hedges enclosing a lane or some other natural form he came across. He would sketch this on […]
Jan van der Ploeg: Holding Up the Walls
Nicola Bozzi reviews the exhibition Jan van der Ploeg: Pink Moon – Organising Principles at New Art Space Amsterdam (NASA), on view through September 1, 2013. Bozzi writes: "Room by room, Pink Moon encourages different viewer approaches to its fully-painted walls. Sometimes it's best to stare at the intersection of two rhombuses and move around, […]
Lauren Luloff: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Lauren Luloff. In a statement about her work for a recent exhibtion at Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto, Luloff wrote: "By painting my close friends and the objects in my studio I have a special moment of intimacy with them… The act of drawing these […]
DeShawn Dumas: Interview
DeShawn Dumas prefers materials that possess troubled pasts in addition to their aesthetic qualities.
Ice Water Flyswatter
Sam Newhouse reviews the exhibition Ice Water Flyswatter at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, curated by Douglas Witmer, on view through September 1, 2013. The show features works by Alain Biltereyst, Cary Smith, Donald Martiny, Douglas Witmer, Mark Wethli, Mary Bucci McCoy, Paige Williams, and Ian White Williams. Newhouse writes: "While the show’s stated intent is […]
Alex Katz & Eric Fischl: Tales of Two Artists
Carl Belz reviews two recent painter's autobiographies: Invented Symbols: An Art Autobiography by Alex Katz (Charta/Colby College Museum of Art) and Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone (Crown). Belz writes that both books "inform our understanding not of any classroom theory about art’s making but of […]
Simon Hantaï @ Centre Pompidou
A review of the retrospective exhibition of works by Simon Hantaï at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view through September 2, 2013. "With more than 130 paintings, many of which were of outstanding quality and drawn from the Pompidou’s inexhaustible collection, the evolution of Hantaï as an artist became tangible. Instead of emphasizing the repetitiveness […]
Katherine Bradford & the Bigger Picture
John Yau reviews the exhibition Katherine Bradford: August at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, on view through September 1, 2013. Yau writes: "Bradford has taken the unlikely genre of marine painting and transformed it into a densely packed, metaphorical realm that is simultaneously abstract and representational — which should clue the viewer […]
Without an Edge There is No Middle
Andy Parkinson reviews the exhibtion the exhibition Without an Edge There is no Middle at Pluspace, Coventry, UK, on view through September 8, 2013. The show features works by Katrina Blannin, Julian Brown, Gordon Dalton, Andrew Graves, Terry Greene, Mark Kennard, Hannah Knox, Mali Morris, Joanna Phelps, Dan Roach, David Ryan, Andrew Seto, and David […]
Pissarro @ Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Xico Greenwald reviews the exhibition Pissarro at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, on view through September 15, 2013. Greenwald writes: "Working in the countryside on the outskirts of Paris, Pissarro’s landscapes examine various lighting and weather conditions with a naturalism that sets him apart from his colleagues. Because he faithfully studied the play of light and […]
Leslie Bell: Interview
Painter's Bread
Michael Rutherford interviews painter Leslie Bell about his work and process. Bell remarks: "The history of painterly expression goes back to the caves but skips generations along the way. The pendulum swings…loose; tight; loose; tight. What excites me most is a dynamic combination of description and expression. I remember as a little kid marveling at […]
Matthew Miller: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Matthew Miller. A new painting by Miller is on view at Pocket Utopia, New York through August 29, 2013. Asked about the black backgrounds in his portraits, Miller comments that "it's similar to a green screen… it could be anything, it's this dense potential… this […]