Victor Pasmore: From Constructions to Spray Paint
David Moxon blogs about the exhibition Victor Pasmore: From Constructions to Spray Paint on view at the NewArtCentre, Wiltshire, England, thorough January 29, 2012. Moxon notes that Pasmore's "late works are becoming more known and understood for their innovative use of spraypaint and the poetic use of line. This exhibition champions his last great abstract […]
Matta at Pace Gallery
Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Matta: A Centennial Celebration at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through Janaury 28, 2012. Naves writes that "Matta's hold on history is less fixed than we thought. The uncanny thing about his expansive brand of Surrealism has always been how it presaged virtual space before the notion became a […]
Gustave Courbet: Rise and Fall of a Master
Mary Tompkins Lewis profiles the recently expanded Musée Courbet in Ornans, France. The expansion, Lewis notes, allows visitors to better understand the arc of Courbet's career. She adds: "The Musée Courbet also locates the artist securely within his native locale. One can glimpse from its windows the same chalky, limestone cliffs that Courbet painted with […]
Renaissance Portraits At The Met
Judith H. Dobrzynski blogs about the exhibition The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view through March 18, 2012. Dobrzynski notes that "The exhibit… starts with a premise: that early Renaissance Italy produced 'the first great age of portraiture in Europe,' a time when artists created fabulous portraits […]
A.R. Penck, Ich in Deutschland (West)
EJ Hauser blogs images of a recent exhibition: A. R. Penck: Vergangenheit-Gegenwart-Zukunft at Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an immense 20 x 40 foot canvas, Me in Germany (West), 1984, "a work that Penck painted non-stop in 35 hours… the piece is not simply about a society, it's about a whole […]
Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park
Tyler Green reviews the exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: Ocean Park at the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, on view through January 15, 2012. Green notes that Diebenkorn's " 'Ocean Park' is the body of work that most absorbs and considers virtually every key innovation of 20th-century painting."
Mel Bochner’s Thesaurus Paintings
Sharon Butler blogs about Mel Bochner's Thesaurus Series, now on view in the exhibition In the Tower: Mel Bochner at National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. on view through April 8, 2012. Butler writes that "The 'Thesaurus' series began with small word-based pieces in the 1960s. Using ink on graph paper Bochner made experimental portraits […]
Jay Gaskill: Studio Visit
Maria Calandra visits the studio of painter Jay Gaskill. Looking at Gaskill's paintings, Calandra "found there to be a vast amount of visual navigation to do on the viewer's part. Does this corner's formation mirror that of the others'? Does the center act as a mandala or are there breaks in its repetition? How is […]
Re-Generation: Josef Albers’ Legacy of Teaching
The new exhibition Re-Generation “traces the regeneration of thought in painting and art education.”
Cole Carothers
Emil Robinson reviews a recent exhibition of paintings by Cole Carothers. Robinson writes "Carothers’s paintings are expansive in their sense of touch. The paint is smashed, slapped, dragged, smeared, scraped, feathered, and redrawn… In their tactility, these paintings give us a sense of intimacy. We see the image but feel its physical presence. The paintings […]
Imi Knoebel: Kartoffelbilder
Beautiful installation photos of the exhibition Imi Knoebel: Potato Images at Galerie Naecht St. Stephan, Vienna, on view through January 21, 2012. The exhibition features three new groups of work by Knoebel: Anima Mundi, Kartoffelbilder, and Cut-up.
Steuart Pittman: Photography & Painting
Part one of Pac Pobric's two-part conversation with painter Steuart Pittman about photography and painting. Pittman remarks: "Being a person who makes reductive work was challenging with this project because I might have been interested in… close-up shots of a wall, any wall… A monochrome painting is a lot different from a monochrome photograph, and […]
Cézanne’s Black
John Berger shares new thoughts on Cézanne after viewing the exhibition Cézanne and Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, on view through February 26, 2012. Berger writes that “after a lifetime’s companionship with him, the show was a revelation. I forgot about impressionism, cubism, 20th-century art history, modernism, postmodernism – and saw only the […]
Metonymy in Painting
Extending an earlier post about metonymy in art, the subject of a book by Denise Green, Deborah Barlow blogs about "the aboriginal women artists of Utopia, in particular Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Minnie Pwerle. Although never exposed to contemporary western art, these women produced paintings that are conversant with something I was seeing in the […]
Frederic Edwin Church: Painting as Cinema
Charley Parker posts about the original cinematic presentation of Frederic Edwin Church's painting Heart of the Andes. Parker notes that "was originally displayed in a dark gallery where it was reportedly lit by theatrical gas jet and reflector lighting and displayed in an elaborate frame, decked with curtains to create the impression of a view […]
Pat Passlof at Elizabeth Harris
Joe Walentini reviews the exhibition Pat Passlof on view at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, on view through December 23, 2011. Walentini remarks: "The place to begin with this exhibition is witnessing the absolute, unfettered joy evident in the paint handling. The paintings begin life intuitively loose, eventually find their way to defining the forms and finally, […]
Mark Stevens on de Kooning
In his weekly podcast, Tyler Green discusses the current de Kooning retrospective with pulizter-prize winner and de Kooning biographer Mark Stevens. Stevens notes that "the revelation of the show should be, because the paintings have been not nearly discussed enough, is his late 70's work. Those particular paintings… are absolutly miracles… extremely juicy, gorgeous, heavy, […]
Tawara Yūsaku: Born Again
Alan Pocaro reviews the exhibition Universe Is Flux: The Art of Tawara Yūsaku at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, on view through April 1, 2012. Pocaro writes: "Like paintings made in expressionist or Zen traditions, Tawara’s works-on-paper look fluid and indifferent to mistake. But the effortlessness is deceptive. Rather than being dashed off in a […]
Visconti Tarot Miniatures
Mark Dylan Sieber posts a gallery of Renaissance tarot cards "hand-painted… with gold and silver gilt, as well as miniature Renaissance portraiture. Originally commissioned by the Viscontis, a Milanese family that dominated the cultural life of Northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, the deck is one of the oldest sets in existence. The […]