Craig Olson: Interview
James Kalm visits the exhibition Craig Olson: 18 Melodies For The Barbarian Flute at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, on view through November 11, 2012. Kalm writes: "Describing his spiritual influences as 'polytheistic,' Olsen crafts wooden panels and encrusts symbols, diagrammatic figures, collage and formalist abstract elements into the objects. This program includes an […]
Wade Guyton Files
Deborah Barlow posts selections from an ongoing conversation on Jerry Saltz's Facebook page about the exhibition Wade Guyton: OS at The Whitney Museum, New York, on view through January 13, 2013. There are nearly 800 responses to Jerry Saltz's comment: "Last week some of you claimed that Wade Guyton’s paintings aren’t paintings. Some called them “prints” […]
Jules Olitski: Revelations in Paint
Hayley Plack blogs about the exhibition Jules Olitski: Revelation: Major Paintings at American University Museum, Washington D.C., on view through December 16, 2012. Plack writes: "Painting was a spiritual experience for Olitski. He describes, 'I’ve come to believe that this power I can surrender to in my studio is indeed a higher power.' Beyond the […]
Artie Vierkant: Cut & Dried
John Haber reviews an exhibition of works by Artie Vierkant at Higher Pictures, New York, on view through October 27, 2012. Haber writes: "Artie Vierkant works with shaped canvas, except that it is not shaped and not canvas. He makes color-field painting, only without paint, and the colors make gradual but striking changes as they […]
David Anfam on Clyfford Still
Tyler Green talks to art historian David Anfam about the Clyfford Still estate. Anfam remarks: "Before the Clyfford Still Museum opened all the world really knew of Still were the classic abstracts." After seeing the paintings in the Still bequest, however, Anfam continues, "my understanding has been completely transformed by the sheer scope and variety […]
Abstraction in an Era of High Definition
David Sweet looks at the role of detail in abstract painting through the work of Robert Holyhead, Mali Morris, and Juan Usle. Sweet writes that unlike these painters "there are plenty of current practitioners whose work, which is abstract by default, contains lots of superimposed, busy, ornamental passages, but who treat detail casually, as though […]
Helen Miranda Wilson
Mario Naves posts about the paintings of Helen Miranda Wilson on the occasion of Wilson's exhibition of new paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on view through November 10, 2012. Naves writes: "How much experience can be embodied in a rectangular patch of color? If we’re to believe Helen Miranda Wilson… quite a […]
Ezra Tessler: Interview
Valerie Brennan interviews painter Ezra Tessler. Tessler comments: "No matter how much planning goes into my work, the painting process takes over… I try to stay open to surprises. A color from one painting will make its way to another, a figure will disappear, or a shape will develop. Scraping and sanding sometimes brings something […]
Mark Dagley: In Conversation
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting meet painter Mark Dagley at his exhibition Structural Solutions, on view at Minus Space, Brooklyn, New York through October 27, 2012. Dagley discusses his installation of three large shaped paintings – each different in form, color, and approach – which nonetheless create a powerful unified experience.
Per Kirkeby at the Phillips
Per Kirkeby speaks to exhibition co-curator Dorothy Kosinski about the necessity of time in the development of a painting.
Allison Gildersleeve: Natural Impressionism
Forrest Perrine blogs about paintings by Allison Gildersleeve. Perrine writes that Gildersleeve's paintings "are all about the wild wild wilderness – its colors, life, fractal chaos – that we too easily overlook. From a distance, Allison’s work looks almost expressionist, but as you look more, you notice meticulously painted shapes that look more and more […]
Alex Olson: Abstract Dissection
Brian Fee reviews the exhibition Alex Olson: Palmist and Editor at Lisa Cooley Gallery, New York, on view through October 28, 2012. Fee writes: "I like Olson’s directness with her paintings’ surfaces, like how she squeegee’d broad blood-orange bars across the gauzy, drybrushed grayscale Weave. These measured bands may seem at odds with the lyrical […]
Shadowy Things & The Pulpit of Modernism
Considering works by Van Gogh, Kandinsky, and Frank Stella, Mark Stone muses on the ongoing tension between figuration and pure abstraction in abstract painting. Stone wrties: "What our abstract painting lacks is a more comprehensive way of seeing and producing imagery that accomodates both our lens-based dematerialised culture and the physical life we live. Our […]
Clyfford Still’s Figures Run Deep
Patricia Failing reports on a new catalogue Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum, which highlights Clyfford Still's lesser-known figurative work. Failing quotes David Anfam, who contributed to the book: " 'I’ve long suspected a figurative substratum lurking in his abstractions,' Anfam observes, "and now I’m convinced. What we get with Still is a productive fusion of […]
Eugen Schönebeck @ David Nolan Gallery
Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Eugen Schönebeck Paintings and Drawings: 1957-1966 at David Nolan Gallery, on view through November 3, 2012. De Jong writes: "Unlike his friend Baselitz, whose career has attained stratospheric success, Schönebeck is little known outside of his native Germany, and according to David Nolan Gallery, this is his first exhibition […]
Charles Hinman: Shape of Things to Come
John Haber reviews a recent exhibtion of paintings by Charles Hinman at Marc Straus Gallery, New York. Haber writes that Hinman's "irregular polyhedra build on oblique triangles and trapezoids. Simpler rectangles lean against or stand one in front of another, as for Johns, but with a noticeable gap between them—or between them and the wall. […]
Maria Walker: Interview
Painter's Bread
Michael Rutherford talks to artist Maria Walker about her work. Rutherford writes: "Altered stretcher bars, torqued and triangulated planes, backs as fronts – the work of Maria Walker is a lesson in harmonizing tradition and experimentation… She has pushed her materials and flowed with them in order to elicit a distinctive sense of aesthetic truth. […]
Rackstraw Downes: On the Masters of Landscape
In this video short, Rackstraw Downes discusses looking at old master paintings by Jacob van Ruysdael, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and Claude Lorrain. Downes comments: "I don't have any sentimentality about those painters, I don't think. It's that they would seem useful to me and provocative to me. They were like challenges to me – […]
Felrath Hines: Balancing Color
Paul Behnke blogs about the work of painter Felrath Hines (1913 – 1993). Behnke quotes Floyd Herman who wrote of Hine's work: "His abstractions synthesized a keen sensibility of an accomplished draughtsman with the poetry and inventive structure that linked his work to the American abstract tradition of Stuart Davis, Al Held, Barnett Newman and […]
Bernard Chaet (1924 – 2012)
Best known as the author of the seminal book The Art of Drawing, Chaet influenced thousands of artists as a teacher and a painter.