Alex O’Neal: Hiding Places in a Dream
Two Coats of Paint
Katarina Wong reviews the recent exhibition Alex O’Neal: Hiding Places in a Dream at Linda Warren Projects, Chicago. Wong writes: “O’Neal tends to pack all of the action in the foreground of his paintings, so much so that it feels as if the air has been purposefully sucked out of the space. People and objects, painted […]
Petra Cortright @ 1301PE
LA Times
Christopher Knight reviews the recent exhibition Petra Cortright: quack doctor violet “saltwater fish” at 1301PE, Los Angeles. Knight begins: “Cortright’s paintings wedge themselves between the celebrated history of gestural art, mostly Expressionist and abstract, and the past generation’s frantic upheaval of established visual norms generated by the emergence and now ubiquity of digital imagery.”
Peter Halley: Paintings from the 1980s
Saturation Point
Piers Veness reviews Peter Halley: Paintings from the 1980s at Modern Art, London, on view through March 18, 2017. Veness writes that the paintings on view “[return] us to the familiar shapes, colours and textures of Peter Halley – the hard-lined geometry of Glowing and Burnt-Out Cells with Conduit (1982), for example, with its characteristic […]
Ralph Coburn’s Random Sequence
New City Art
Stephen F. Eisenman reviews Ralph Coburn’s Random Sequence at the Arts Club of Chicago, on view through April 22, 2017. Eisenman writes: “what is most remarkable is that Coburn’s multi-section paintings incorporate choice: the owner-curator is expected to rearrange the parts as she wishes. The idea, which has its origins in Dada with Jean Arp […]
Elise Ansel: Dialogue
ARTnews
Alfred Mac Adam reviews the recent exhibition Elise Ansel: Dialogue at Danese/Corey Gallery, New York. Mac Adam writes: “Ansel investigates the ‘dialogues’ her paintings establish with the great masters … We can identify three moments in the gestation of Ansel’s version: first, her contemplation of the original in one form or another (in person, in […]
Victor Pasmore @ Pallant House Gallery
AbCrit
Robin Greenwood reviews Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, on view through June 11, 2017. Greenwood concludes: “… right from the off, his paintings show an interest in spatiality and volume, starting with the Cézanne-esque Bradman Still Life of 1929, which emphasises rounded three-dimensionality over planar flatness; and continuing right […]
R. B. Kitaj @ Marlborough Contemporary
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews R. B. Kitaj: The Exile at Home at Marlborough Contemporary, New York, on view through April 8, 2017. Yau writes: “B. Kitaj was passionately–one might almost say, defiantly–a literary painter. That was not a politic thing to be in the postwar art world, when abstraction became the mainstream and even most representational […]
Beyond the Surface: Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017)
Apollo Magazine
Martin Gayford’s 2010 profile of painter Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017), republished to mark the artist’s passing this week at age 84. Gayford notes that “[Hodgkin’s] work is deeply paradoxical. For one thing, it frequently looks abstract at first and even second glance, but it is actually figurative and rooted in his experience… Hodgkin is an intensely emotional […]
Jordan Kasey: Strangely Lit and Shadowed Paintings
Hyperallergic
Dennis Kardon reviews Jordan Kasey: Exoplanet at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, on view through March 12, 2017. Kardon writes: “The force that drives the engine of Kasey’s work is her eschewal of the flat-earth ideology (collaged, cartoony or photo-derived, super-flat figuration) of many of her contemporaries. Although sharing formal explorations with older painters like […]
Cy Twombly @ the Pompidou
London Review of Books
Alice Spawls reviews works by Cy Twombly at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view through April 24, 2017. Spawls notes: “For all that his paintings groan under the weight of writing about them, and their own allusiveness (many feature lines of poetry or have ‘poetic’ titles), Twombly wasn’t an ideas artist. He disagreed with the […]
David Reed: Clarity of Facture
artcritical
James Hyde reviews the recent exhibition Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Hyde writes: “Part of the interest of the work, then and now, is how it distills painterliness. The schema is simple—each painting contains roughly a dozen horizontal bands of red or black alternating with white or off-white. The canvas […]
Hercules Segers: Master of the Unreal
New York Review of Books
Christopher Benfey reviews The Mysterious Landscapes of Hercules Segers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through May 21, 2017. Benfey writes: “An air of unreality hangs over the astonishing exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers … More than once, I found myself wondering whether this extraordinary etcher and painter—the creator […]
Elliott Green @ Pierogi
Hamptons Art Hub
Peter Malone reviews Elliott Green: Human Nature at Pierogi Gallery, New York, through March 26, 2017. Malone writes: “What’s unique about Elliott Green is how he strides confidently right over the rumbling fracture. Brandishing all manner of surface gymnastics, he takes the staid genre of landscape painting and puts it through a gantlet of techniques […]
Marc Trujillo: Nowhere and Everywhere
Huffington PostJohn Seed
John Seed interviews painter Marc Trujillo on the occasion of the exhibition Marc Trujillo: Urban Ubiquity at The Bakersfield Museum of Art, on view through May 7, 2017. Trujillo comments: “The chill of the void is alluring to me. These places that are nowhere and everywhere, big stretches of concrete and linoleum give me a […]
Tirtzah Bassel: Interview
Open House
Debbi Kenote and Til Will interview painter Tirtzah Bassel whose work was recently on view with Slag Gallery at the Volta Art Fair, New York. Bassel comments: “… a lot of times the images in my paintings start from just an everyday situation that you would kind of see anywhere, right, at this point. You’re […]
Donald Beal: Interview
Painting Perceptions
Larry Groff interviews painter Donald Beal whose work will be on view in On the Shoulder of Giants, curated by Thaddeus Radell, at Westbeth Gallery, New York, on view through March 25, 2017. Beal comments: “The paintings done from life have given me the chops I need to meaningfully push color and tone around until it eventually […]
R.B. Kitaj: Renewal and Resistance
artcritical
David Cohen’s 2003 interview with painter R.B.Kitaj, republished on the occasion of the exhibition R.B.Kitaj: The Exile at Home, curated by Barry Schwabsky, at Marlborough Contemporary, New York, on view through April 8, 2017. “[Kitaj] is living proof of some traits his critic enemies picked up on: a promiscuous lover of big ideas, an inveterate historical […]
Alfred Sisley @ the Bruce Museum
Hamptons Art Hub
Susan Hodara reviews Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master, an exhibition of 50 paintings at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, on view through May 21, 2017. Hodara notes that the show “is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years… [curator MaryAnne Stevens] described Sisley as ‘a pure Impressionist.’ A dedicated […]
Douglas Witmer’s Simplicity
Two Coats of Paint
Becky Huff Hunter reviews Douglas Witmer: Dubh Glas at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, on view through March 12, 2017. Hunter writes: “Each work in Witmer’s austere Winterbrook (2015‒17) series of six small panels brings out a different relational quality between paint and canvas: black wash opens up the flawed pores of the canvas grain; dense, dry paint […]
Katharina Grosse: Interview
Brooklyn Rail
Phong Bui interviews painter Katharina Grosse whose work is on view at Gagosian Gallery, New York, through March 11, 2017. Grosse comments: “I think color is such an interesting analytical aspect of painting. It can sit anywhere. It can fit into anything. It can unify or break up the hierarchical orderliness of how we see the […]