Federico Barocci: Reappraised
Robin Blake reviews the exhibition Barocci: Brilliance and Grace at the National Gallery, London, on view through May 14, 2013. Blake visits the show seeking answers to the assertion, by the Director of London’s National Gallery, that "the now obscure Federico Barocci of Urbino, was a better painter than his contemporary El Greco."
Derek Roberts: Northern Paintings
Alan Shipway reviews the exhibition Derek Roberts: Northern Paintings at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, on view through April 14, 2013. Shipway writes: "It is painting which has decorative qualities, but whose complex visual intensity transcends its being merely decorative. This complexity seems to have to unfold over time for the onlooker like nothing else contemporary: […]
Philip Guston: Centennial Exhibition
Caleb De Jong reviews Philip Guston: A Centennial Exhibition at McKee Gallery, New York, on view through April 20th, 2013. De Jong writes: "Guston's painting stands slightly apart from time, his own and our own. Yet within Guston's art is a continuity of formal and conceptual concerns that in retrospect makes Guston's entire career more […]
Amanda Friedman: Interview
Painter's Bread
Michael Rutherford interviews painter Amanda Friedman about her work and studio practice. Friedman's work was recently on view at Eli Ping, New York. Rutherford writes that "the expansive, sprawling swaths of paper that Amanda Friedman refers to as Thought-forms have pulled me into their orbit and provided plenty to think about. The painted surfaces, existing […]
Gary Petersen: Interview
Dar Dowling interviews painter Gary Petersen whose work is currently on view in the group show Tectonic Drift at Brian Morris Gallery, New York, through March 16, 2013. Petersen comments: "The vocabulary I use has developed over time and begins with my interest in line: how line defines a space, echoes the edge and also, […]
Sarah Walker & Jason Karolak
Joanne Mattera blogs about two exhibitions on the Lower East Side: Jason Karolak at McKenzie Fine Art (on view through March 17) and the recent show Sarah Walker: Drift at Artifact. Mattera writes that "Karolak pulls you into his visual webs, cubicular orgies of analogous color that suggest the containments of architecture or conversely, mathematical […]
Margaret Grimes: Connective Sublime
Jennifer Samet reviews the exhibition Margaret Grimes, A Retrospective, at Western Connecticut State University, on view through March 14, 2013. Samet writes: "Margaret Grimes’s paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest." Samet […]
Manet: Defying Words
On the occasion of the exhibition Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy, London (on view through April 14, 2013), Ben Wiedel-Kaufmann examines the paintings of Manet and the failure of language to capture the "complex tying together of propositions, the psychological nuances and the suspension of time that characterise our experience of painting." "Wrapped […]
Callum Innes at Whitworth Art Gallery
Andy Parkinson reviews an exhibition of recent paintings by Callum Innes at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, on view through June 16, 2013. Parkinson writes that in viewing the painting Untitled 31, "there’s something timeless… except that it also seems to mark the passing of time both of the artist in the making of it and […]
Jeffrey Cortland Jones: In Conversation
Brent Hallard in conversation with painter Jeffrey Cortland Jones. Hallard begins the dialogue by noting that Jones' works are typcially "no larger than 14 inches on the high side, and the fact that the internal dynamics don’t really push beyond the borders, urges us to focus on what is there, with our eyes and our […]
Jay DeFeo: Close Up
James Kalm video blogs a walk-through of the exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum, New York, on view through June 2, 2013. Kalm's video provides a unique, virtual close-up look at DeFeo's masterpiece The Rose. As Kalm notes the show "allows viewers the opportunity to see the wider spectrum of works produced […]
Thomas Lawson: Humor in Painting
A report on a talk by painter Thomas Lawson about his work and practice given recently at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. "Early in his talk, Lawson brought up the question of painting's current validity as a medium – an ongoing dialog in which he has had a significant voice. Perhaps not surprisingly, he […]
Becky Yazdan: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Becky Yazdan. Yazdan describes how she works "from memories, personal narrative and storytelling… Painting for me, is a way to process all the stuff that's going on in my head, it's a way to get my own personal narrative. Those layers, thinking about things in […]
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Interview
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung discusses her work in a new video produced by the Walker Art Center on the occasion of the exhibition Painter Painter at the Walker, on view through October 27, 2013. Zuckerman-Hartung comments: "Deconstructed painting would be the best possible term for it. That implies how it's operating for me and how I'm thinking […]
Sandy Walker: In Nature
David Cohen reviews the exhibition Sandy Walker: In Nature at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on view through March 9, 2013. Cohen writes that "while [Walker's] exuberantly brushed, improvisatory landscapes veer towards the pantheistic in a generalized evocation of nature, they also seem, and in fact are, rooted in direct observation of actual places to […]
Alan Uglow: Object & Image
Alan Uglow’s abstract paintings engage with each other and the viewer to create subtle, shifting apprehensions of flatness and illusion.
Jered Sprecher: Interview
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Jered Sprecher about his work and practice. Sprecher's paintings are currently on view in the solo exhibition I Always Lie at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York through March 23, 2013. Sprecher comments: "Paintings usually start from two different places. Some paintings begin with a found image, something like a quilt, gemstone, […]
Matthew Dibble: Visual Conversation
Katherine Aimone writes about the paintings of Matthew Dibble. Aimone notes that the "energy on [Dibble's] canvases is scrappy, adventurous, unapologetic, and direct… there is an active athleticism in the dynamic surfaces of his pieces." In painting Temple Hum, she continues, "painterly surfaces merge and commune with one another—visual sensations advance and recede to create […]
Linda Francis: We Can Build You
Matthew Hassell reviews the exhibition Linda Francis: We Can Build You at Minus Space, Brooklyn, on view through March 23, 2013 Hassell writes: "To put it simply, Francis’s work is something of an intellectual feast. She is one of those people whose baffling understanding paired with a grasp of such a wide range of ideas […]
Bernard Frize: Winter Diary
Terry R. Myers reviews the exhibition Bernard Frize: Winter Diary at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through March 9, 2013. Myers begins: "Somehow the sum of 100 percent offhandedness and 100 percent calculation, Bernard Frize’s paintings continue to defy even their own expectations, provocatively dividing them from the work of his peers without coming […]