Geometry: Old School, New School
Joanne Mattera blogs installaton photos of two recent exhibitions of geometric painting: Frederick Hammersley at Ameringer McEnery Yohe and Ann Pibal at Meulensteen. Of Pibal's work Mattera writes that "You're up against the image, with its flat color and oddly directional elements, and then, boom, you find you've fallen in."
Stanley Spencer: Through the Birds’ Window
Alex Cohen muses on Stanley Spencer's painting The Builders, 1935. Cohen writes: "Spencer was a master at elevating ordinary acts into deeply emotive and even divine experiences. By letting his compassion for ordinariness spill from masonry to the secret lives of birds he expanded the idea of home. Illustrating the bird’s perspective alongside the builders […]
Noël Dolla: Readymade Pure Painting
Raphael Rubinstein blogs about the under-known work of Noël Dolla. Rubinstein maintains that Dolla has made "…some of the most significant statements in and about painting… with dishtowels, handkerchiefs, fishing lures, pillowcases and rolls of 14-centimeter wide muslin." Rubinstein also notes that Dolla was "Fascinated by domestic readymades and also by pure color, passionately committed […]
Paul Housley
Conor Brennan blogs about painter Paul Housley. Brennan notes that Housley's paintings "suggest a strength of feeling that recalls the days when artists were mythologised as heroes. Yet while his imagery often conjures the ghosts of painting’s past – Picasso here, Rembrandt there – the works low-key subject matter and humble scale undercuts the grandiosity."
Robert Armstrong: Afterimages
Paul Behnke photoblogs works by painter Robert Armstrong from the 2007 exhibition Afterimages at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin. The press release notes that Armstrong's works "pay attention to apparently inconsequential aspects of images seized from an assortment of historical and contemporary sources. Often the focus is on fragments cropped out of historically significant, richly detailed […]
Frank Stella: The Good, The Bad & The Baroque
John Bunker reflects on the daring nature of Frank Stella's oeuvre. Bunker notes: "Stella started his career by examining the architecture of a painting as object. He makes the image and the object one….This is a guy who knows what Modernism is with a capital M! He is not an artist of touch, of painterliness. […]
Charles Tyrrell: In Conversation
Roisín McGuigan interviews painter Charles Tyrrell. Tyrrell notes: "I put a lot of store on the process and allow the paintings build from my understanding of and relationship with the process… Usually ideas and images that I feel create the right arena for things to happen, for notions to develop and expand and grow towards […]
Marc Trujillo: North American Purgatory
John Seed blogs about the paintings of Marc Trujillo, on view at Hirschl and Adler Modern, New York through December 3, 2011. Seed writes: "Trujillo sees what he calls 'visual potential' in mundane subject matter: big box stores and fast food meals. Painting with a moral seriousness reminiscent of Chardin or Vermeer, Trujillo finds poetry […]
Carel Weight: All Souls
Anne Karsten blogs about the work of painter Carel Weight. Karsten writes: "Weight's paintings are captivating for many reasons – his color sense is perfectly in tune with his mysterious imagery, his realism is modified by the emotions of fear and anguish, and his compositions reveal a deep understanding of 2-d image structure… It isn't […]
Josephine Halvorson: Interview
Phong Bui interviews painter Josephine Halvorson. Asked about scale Halvorson notes that "with this new body of paintings, the different surfaces of various objects that I am painting are pretty much always at an arm's length away; I mean I could reach out and touch them if I wanted to. The best-case scenario is […]
Ruth Miller: Everything’s Gone Green
John Goodrich reviews the exhibition Ruth Miller: Recent Work at Lohin Geduld Gallery, on view through November 12, 2011. Goodrich begins: “It’s no surprise that over the decades, the painterly landscapes and still lifes of Ruth Miller… have gained many admirers. Her vivid hues and richly scumbled surfaces have an immediate appeal, but more impressive […]
Deborah Zlotsky: Adjacent Possibilities
Michael Sorgatz posts about the exhibition Deborah Zlotsky: Adjacent Possibilities at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, on view through November 12, 2011. The gallery notes that Zlotsky "borrows from the scientific term which refers to the way organisms and systems seek alternative states of being by shifting slightly from a designated path. When this happens, more […]
Marius Bercea: Interview
Rebecca Wright interviews Transylvanian painter Marius Bercea about the Cluj School of painting. Bercea notes: "the painting from Cluj is associated with the term Figurative Painting, which has regained more than a fashionable status in the art world, and the 'old masters' have become key reference points for many contemporary painters. Painting, as setting unctuous […]
Richard Allan George: Drawings
Alan Pocaro reviews the exhibition A Fine Line, Drawings by Richard Allan George and Peter Loewer, recently on view at Malton Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio. Pocaro notes: "George has created a series of images whose nearest analogs are the Polynesian paintings of Paul Gauguin. In those works, Gauguin replaced the reality of a Tahiti dominated by […]
George Nick: The World is Flat
Catherine Kehoe posts an interview with painter George Nick. Nick comments: "In the beginning, I always felt I couldn't remake the world but I would like to try. I didn't know how so I tried different ways. I am still doing that. I am not that focused. I go out to paint. I look for […]
John M. Miller at Margo Leavin
Christopher Knight reviews the exhibition John M. Miller: Yesterdays on view at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through November 12, 2011. Knight notes: "Miller's paintings virtually demand an investment in contemplative time. Without it, they remain essentially out of sight. Some of the angled bars mix blue, purple or green pigment into black, […]
Martín Ramírez: Landscapes
Blake Gopnik blogs images from the exhibition Martín Ramírez: Landscapes at Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York, on view through November 12, 2011. Gopnik notes that "Ramírez’s work is irresistibly complex. The way he handles shape and space reminds me of some Byzantine art, but the lack of figures is haunting."
Agnes Martin: Nice & Tough
John Haber reviews the exhibition Agnes Martin: The '80s: Grey Paintings at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through October 29, 2011. Haber writes: "Martin's museum-pieces generally run to soft primaries, earning their pale and their transparency from thin horizontals on white canvas. Nothing here looks anything less than solid. The horizontals run all the […]
Julian Stanczak: Interview
Julie Karabenick interviews Julian Stanczak about his work. Stanczak notes: "my primary interest is color – the energy of the different wavelengths of light and their juxtapositions. The primary drive of colors is to give birth to light. But light always changes; it is evasive. I use the energy of this flux because it offers […]
Georges Braque at Acquavella
Mario Naves reviews the exhibition Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on view through November 30, 2011. Naves remarks: "From the early fauvist landscapes to the invention and refining of Cubism to the darker, more equivocal works of the 1940s and '50s, Pioneer of Modernism elaborates upon Braque's oeuvre with surprising […]