Deirdre Swords: They Who Would Cultivate
Peter Acheson blogs about the exhibition Deirdre Swords: Paintings at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY, on view through September 9, 2012. Acheson writes: "Ostensibly, abstract and gestural, the works slowly reveal a theme under the color and brushwork. Each work reinforces, then subtly contradicts the next, adding information to a baseline of brushstroke and rough […]
Hannah Barrett: Interview
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy interview painter Hannah Barrett about her work. Barrett has described her paintings as"invented portraits based on collage. Copies of photos or in some cases, copies of paintings are cut apart and reassembled into figures of ambiguous gender. Fusing the features of both sexes creates a range of androgynous characters that may […]
David Reed: A Place Only Possible in Painting
David Rhodes reviews the exhibition David Reed: Heart of Glass: Paintings and Drawings 1967-2012 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, on view through October 7, 2012. Rhodes writes: "As real to the eye as it is fictive to thought, the effect here of Reed’s color and surface establishes a place only possible in painting. The physical layering […]
Dov Talpaz: In Conversation
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Dov Talpaz about his work. Samet writes: "Dov is a romantic storyteller in his painting – even contemporary life (he paints on the street as well as in the studio), becomes timeless, universal meditations on humanity. The bodies are lyric, lilting forms, equal parts Duccio and Bob Thompson, set in darkly-layered, […]
Georg Baselitz: Das Negativ
R. Donnelly blogs about the exhibition Georg Baselitz: Das Negativ at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, on view through August 31, 2012. Donnelly writes: "In Das Negativ, Baselitz paints from photographic negatives, resulting in a necessarily dark palette, with subjects obscured in their reversed portrayals– a step beyond the artist’s usual practice of painting his figures […]
Ruth Abrams: Microcosms
Caleb De Jong reviews the exhibition Ruth Abrams: Microcosms at Yeshiva University Museum, on view through January 6, 2012. De Jong writes: "Sometimes measuring only a square inch on either side, these paintings, if such a big word can be used to describe these objects, conger corners of landscapes, moons and mountains. Whereas her larger […]
Simon Callery: Material Landscape
Simon Callery discusses his exhibition Inland Sealand, commissioned by Exlab and Sherborne House Arts, on view though September 9, 2012. Callery remarks: "my challenge was to be aware of the geology under foot, to recognize its impact on the character and use of the landscape and importantly to work out how this might influence the […]
Painting in Chicago
Philip A Hartigan reviews three painting exhibitions in Chicago: Wilder Buck, Dan Mills and Glenn Wexler at Zolla-Lieberman (through August 25), Zg Gallery‘s 10th Anniversary Summer Group Show (through September 1), Marco Casentini: New Work at Roy Boyd Gallery (through September 1). Hartigan writes: "This part of the Chicago art world, believe it or not, […]
History & Nostalgia in Painting
Paul Corio argues that the way forward for painting is to engage more meaningfully with its history. Corio writes: "I know people having been writing about the death of the avant-garde for more than fifty years, but I mean it this time – it's exhausted, and this is not a tragedy; the vast majority of […]
Steven Charles: Studio Visit
Katarina Hybenova profiles Bushwick-based painter Steven Charles whose work was recently on view in the exhibiiton There Are No Giants Upstairs at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn. Hybenova writes: "Steven Charles’ soul probably looks something like his art. It’s colorful, lively and giggling at a bunch of insider jokes. If you look closely and patiently you will see […]
Harold Reddicliffe: Interview
Larry Groff interviews painter Harold Reddicliffe about his work. Reddicliffe notes: "I’m endlessly fascinated by the idea of taking… a real three-dimensional object or objects and translating them on to a flat surface so that clearly the reality of the object I’m actually making (the painting) is that surface, and the flat shapes on it. […]
Cy Twombly & the School of the Fontainebleau
Pac Pobric reviews the exhibition Cy Twombly and the School of the Fontainebleau at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, on view through October 7, 2012. Pobric writes: "If saying that Twombly was an artist and not a historian seems obvious, the implications of that probably aren’t. When we say that Twombly was a painter interested […]
Chuck Webster: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Chuck Webster. Webster's work will be on view at Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston from September 6 – October 13, 2012. In 2011 Carol Diehl wrote of Webster's work: "At first glance, the quirky, cartoonlike quality of Webster's semiabstractions may seem more trendy than profound. With […]
Gerhard Richter at PAM
Arcy Douglass blogs about the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Seven Works at the Portland Art Museum, on view through September 9, 2012. "The works are often monochromes, the most spectacular of which is Grau (Gray)… One gets the feeling that it is a painting made out of frustration. Maybe he wanted to make a painting that […]
Kevin Appel
Geoff Tuck reviews the exhibition Kevin Appel, Paintings at Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles, on view through August 23, 2012. "There is a photographic base to these paintings – Appel takes pictures of landscapes ('in the landscape,' the artist says) and he mechanically applies them to treated canvas and then by hand he paints over them. […]
de Kooning: Flying Blind
Thomas Micchelli discusses the "blind" drawings of Willem de Kooning, now on view in the exhibition Eyes Closed/Eyes Open: Recent Acquisitions in Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 7, 2012. Micchelli writes: "De Kooning’s hand… feels out the image in two dimensions, creating space and volume that exists in its […]
Josephine Halvorson: Close Encounters
Video interview with painter Josephine Halvorson. Halvorson discusses her process of working on location in a single session. She notes: "I can feel with my brushstrokes what it's like to be that surface or that object. So say it's steel, when I make that color and I paint it down, it feels like steel when […]
Susanna Coffey: Studio Visit
Elisabeth Condon visits the studio of painter Susanna Coffey and blogs a photo preview of Coffey's paintings for an upcoming exhibition at Alpha Gallery in Boston. Condon writes that Coffey's "paintings have changed radically, while retaining salient characteristics such as cropped portrait size, large scale seen close-to, subtle, but exciting color transitions and a 'knit-painting' […]
Ginny Casey: Recurring Sensations
Sharon Butler blogs about the work of painter Ginny Casey whose exhibition, Green Teeth at Culture Room, Bushwick, Brooklyn is on view through August 29, 2012. Butler writes: "Embracing sincerity, symbolism, and personal narrative, Casey paints clunky shapes, exaggerated limbs and oddly proportioned objects that remind me of Amy Sillman and Susan Rothenberg. She has […]
Les Rogers: Question of the Frame
Jonathan Beer reviews the exhibition Les Rogers: Summer Swells at Half Gallery, New York, on view through September 2, 2012. Beer writes: "At first glance the modestly sized abstract works appear to be inside strange wooden frames; a thick black line outlining each painting. With a closer look it becomes clear that the frame and […]