The Tender Playfulness of Paul Klee
Joseph Nechvatal reviews Paul Klee: L’Ironie à l’Oeuvre at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view through August 1, 2016. Nechvatal writes: “The key to Paul Klee’s wonderfully shaped energy is not ironic detachment, as the title of the Centre Pompidou’s current retrospective suggests, but rather the playful and idyllic emotion he transmits through masterly line […]
Watteau’s Soldiers @ the Frick Collection
In Watteau’s world, more than in any other painter’s, figure to canvas is as actor to stage.
Mary Heilmann @ the Whitechapel Gallery
Charley Peters reviews Mary Heilmann: Looking at Pictures at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, on view through August 21, 2016. Peters writes: “‘Looking at Pictures’ makes much of Heilmann as an artist who paints her own life – the exhibition title itself is taken from a section of her aforementioned biography – but there is nothing […]
Richard Bell: Interview
Michael Parsons interviews artist Richard Bell on the occasion of Bell’s recent exhibition of paintings at The Mercus Barn, Mercus-Garrabet, France. Bell comments: “The embodiment of colour into a material organisation is primary. It would follow that what you can say, know and understand about that order (the intelligible nature of the work) is secondary […]
William Eckhardt Kohler @ Linda Warren Projects
Alan Pocaro reviews William Eckhardt Kohler: Alchemy + Elements at Linda Warren Projects, Chicago, on view through August 13, 2016. Pocaro writes: “Once through Kohler’s looking glass, each picture ceases to be a mere amalgam of oil and linen. Instead, the artist’s brush offers us a glimpse into an otherworldly place… That painting can show […]
Women of Abstract Expressionism
Hrag Vartanian talks with curator Gwen Chanzit, painter Judith Godwin, art historian Linda Nochlin, and critic Karen Wilkin about the marginalization of female Abstract Expressionist painters on the occasion of the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, on view through September 25, 2016. The show features works by Mary Abbott, Jay […]
Eric Aho @ the New Britain Museum
Sharon Butler blogs about Eric Aho: An Unfinished Point in a Vast Surrounding at the New Britain Museum of American Art, on view through September 11, 2016. Butler writes: “Aho’s paintings, unfettered by contemporary doubt, evoke the gestural abstraction of the post-war period–think Willem de Kooning meets Joan Mitchell. His ongoing interests in memory, culture, […]
Shapeshifters @ Luhring Augustine
David Rhodes reviews Shapeshifters at Luhring Augustine, New York, on view through August 12, 2016. Rhodes observes: “… gone today are the conscious strictures and aesthetic divisions articulated in 1967 by Michael Fried in his germinal essay ‘Art and Objecthood,’ though some of the exhibition’s earliest works are from that moment. There are works here that evince […]
Hubert Robert: 1733-1808
Barrymore Laurence Scherer reviews Hubert Robert, 1733–1808 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., on view through October 2, 2016. Scherer writes: “The beguiling power of Robert’s imagery springs from the ingenuity of his pictorial method. Composed with low, dramatic viewpoints through soaring arches or angled colonnades or from below rises in the landscape, […]
John Mills: The Eyes Have It
Jason Ramos reviews the recent exhibition John Mills: For Your Eyes Only at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles. Ramos writes: “Having staked his claim with his format, ground, scale and referents, Mills’s new work is free to juggle the possibilities and delights offered with painting’s phenomenological effects. Space is stacked, folded, stretched and warped; marks, […]
Alma Thomas @ the Studio Museum
Peter Schjeldahl reviews a retrospective exhibition of works by Alma Thomas at The Studio Museum in Harlem, on view through October 30, 2016. Schjeldahl writes: “[Thomas’] best acrylics and watercolors of loosely gridded, wristy daubs are among the most satisfying feats (and my personal favorites) of the Washington Color School, a group that included Morris […]
Bhupen Khakhar @ Tate Modern
Peter Parker reviews Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All at Tate Modern, on view through November 6, 2016. Parker writes that Khakhar’s “influences are astonishingly varied and not always obvious. Tiger and Stag (1970), for example, clearly nods to both Indian miniatures and Henri Rousseau, but the image of the animals was in fact taken […]
Nicole Eisenman’s Path to Genius
Barry Schwabsky reviews two recent exhibitions: Nicole Eisenman: Al-ugh-gories at the New Museum and Nicole Eisenman: Magnificent Delusion at Anton Kern Gallery. Schwabsky observes: “In a surprising way, Eisenman recognizes that today, allegory can only ever be ‘al-ugh-ory,’ and that the artist can only be … impure, contaminated by irrational animal impulses. Behind this attitude lies her […]
Hilma af Klint: Sustenance & Possibility
Barbara Campbell Thomas blogs about the recent exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting The Unseen at Serpentine Gallery, London. Thomas writes that “[af Klint’s] paintings have a warm and engaging precision, an orderly structure qualified by traces of a clumsy hand, alternately luminous and muddy coloration, and her awkwardly drawn representational imagery. It is their particular […]
Charles Yuen: Interview
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Charles Yuen. Yuen remarks: “When I embark on a painting, my ideas are very slight and unformed, and I almost insist on that. I don’t want to execute paintings; I want them to be organic entities. If I have a sketch for a painting, it is a little thumbnail doodle. My […]
The Goo of Paint: How Every Mark Matters
Jennifer Coates writes about the “referential potential of the painterly gesture.” Coates’ exhibition Carb Load ws recently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). Coates concludes: “The myriad ways to treat the goo of paint speak of both destruction and careful manipulation. When images break down into lawless, senseless viscosity, there is […]
Jordan Kasey: Interview
Alyse Ronayne interviews painter Jordan Kasey whose exhibition Free Time was recently on view at Signal Gallery, Brooklyn. Kasey comments: “I like when the finished painting represents something that I can’t quite put my finger on or explain to people. I like when there’s a sense of mystery that isn’t forced and contrived. I like […]
Jonathan Lasker: Interview
Phong Bui interviews painter Jonathan Lasker. Lasker remarks: ” … at least for me, it’s about this contemplative relationship to things. I think painting partially comes from an affection for the state of being. We so want to regard the things around us, to make perceptual impressions of that, which is around us in the […]
C. W. Eckersberg @ Fondation Custodia
Julian Barnes reviews C. W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) Danish artist in Paris, Rome and Copenhagen at Fondation Custodia, Paris, on view through August 14, 2016. Barnes writes: “A portrait drawing by Ingres can engage us more than some of his grandest historical works. More widely, there is a slippage in the hierarchy of genre. And so […]
Rachael Wren: Interview
Danni Shen interviews painter Rachael Wren on the occasion of Wren’s exhibition The Edge of Place at Wave Hill House, on view through December 04, 2016. Wren remarks: “Although the colors in my work come from real experiences, the paintings don’t refer to any particular place. I’m not trying to recreate a specific landscape, but […]