Joanne Greenbaum: Interview
Phong Bui interviews painter Joanne Greenbaum on the occasion of her exhibition at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, on view through July 1, 2016. Greenbaum remarks: "One thing I can say about myself is that I don’t ever stay still. It doesn’t mean I’m always moving forward, I could be moving back. Sometimes I want to […]
David Reed: A Painter’s Life
Sharon Butler reviews David Reed: New Paintings at Peter Blum Gallery, New York on view through June 25, 2016. Butler begins: "At Peter Blum, the looping brushstrokes and open surfaces of David Reed’s remarkably spare site-specific installation are anything but casual. Entering the gallery, the viewer is faced with a 40-foot long multi-panel horizontal piece […]
Philip Guston: The Chameleon Painter
Barry Schwabsky reviews Philip Guston Painter, 1957-1967 at Hauser & Wirth, New York, on view through 29 July 2016. Schwabsky writes that the "show really encompasses three distinct stages in his career. Early in the 1950s, his painterly touch was often considered a bit refined compared with some of his more swashbuckling colleagues. In the […]
Fred Reichman & Eleanor Ray
Leah Ollman reviews works by Fred Reichman and Eleanor Ray at The Landing, Los Angeles, on view through July 16, 2016. Ollman writes that Reichman's "quietly radiant paintings share much with that poetic form. Spare and reductive, they draw upon observations of the everyday, within the home and natural landscape. They are acts of reverence […]
Asger Jorn @ Petzel
Alfred Mac Adam reviews Asger Jorn: The Open Hide at Petzel Gallery, New York, on view through July 29, 2016. Mac Adam writes: "Jorn’s artistic development is clear and brief. Trained as a figurative artist, he fell under the spell of Expressionism, which contained elements akin to his own nature: caricature, unnatural color, and forceful […]
Basil Beattie: When Now Becomes Then
Nick Moore reviews Basil Beattie: When Now Becomes Then – Three Decades at MIMA, on view through June 12, 2016. Moore writes that it is "refreshing to hear [Beattie] say that having a show like this is a way of ‘learning about what I am doing’. It is not a grand finished statement but a […]
Erika Ranee: Interview
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Erika Ranee. Asked about the materiality of her work Ranee comments: "when I do pours, or put shellac down, or spritz the painting, and come back the next day, it does not look the way I had planned. That’s why I do it. It forces me to relinquish control. If I […]
Picasso and the Fall of Europe
London Review of Books
T.J. Clark reflects on Picasso's mural Fall of Icarus (1958). Clark writes: "My argument, then, is that it was only in the real-size, forty-piece Fall of Icarus that Picasso escaped from Cubism – from the studio, from ‘viewpoint,’ from proximity and tactility, from the whole spatial and figurative world of Guernica – and showed us […]
Sadie Benning @ Callicoon Fine Arts
Jeffrey Collins blogs about Sadie Benning: Green God at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York, on view through July 29, 2016. Collins writes that "[Benning's] work has a directness to it, it's immediate but there is also the underlying sense of much more going on than what you immediately see. I recall taking in the craft […]
Reflecting on Vermeer
Riad Miah reflects on the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. Miah writes that Vermeer's works "are open invitations to looking long and carefully. And the act of looking and investigating, combing through the details of his paintings are at the core of what I find so sustaining. In a world where we can find boundless information […]
Mark Bradford: What Else Can Art Do?
Calvin Tomkins profiles painter Mark Bradford. Tomkins writes: "Although he hasn’t really used artist’s paints or brushes since he was in art school, what Bradford makes are abstract paintings. He starts with a stretched canvas and builds up its surface with ten or fifteen layers of paper—white paper, colored paper, newsprint, reproductions, photographs, printed texts—fixing […]
Katherine Bradford: Interview
Ashley Stull Meyers interviews painter Katherine Bradford whose exhibition Divers and Dreamers is on view at Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon through June 3, 2016. Bradford comments: "I want to examine large themes that exist in any time or place—themes like isolation, community, play, or wonder. My paintings are full of awe for our place […]
Laura Owens @ CCA Wattis Institute
Charles Desmarais reviews Laura Owens: Ten Paintings at CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, on view through July 23, 2016. Desmarais writes: "Papering the walls with large hand-printed sheets, she has created a vast picture of layers of images in various stages of dissipation. Gaseous clouds of pixels and picture-parts unravel, carrying along image-objects from the […]
Zachary Keeting: Interview
Brett Wallace interviews painter Zachary Keeting. Keeting comments: "Improvisation is huge, but there’s careful organization going on as well; these two polarities are sometimes at odds, sometimes complimentary. The proportions of synthesis and discord vary from piece to piece. Slurries of difference excite me, and keep the painting process difficult. Toggling between the impulsive and […]
Abstraction: Content & Continuity
Robin Greenwod reflects on future directions in abstraction. Greenwood writes: "… once abstract art takes upon itself a full measure of human content, the counter-intuitive sense of this proposition – of abstract content as human content – inverts. Remember, we are not trying to illustrate human values, we are trying to “make” them anew. The […]
Stanley Boxer: Fabricated Galaxies
Tim Keane writes about the paintings of Stanley Boxer which were recently on view at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York. Keane observes: "If there is a single identifiable subject to his resolutely abstract works, it is coalescence — the gradual coming together of disparate colors, textures and granules. As a result, the paintings frequently suggest […]
Alex Katz / Meghan Brady & Gideon Bok
James Kalm visits two New York shows: Alex Katz at Gavin Brown's Enterprise (through June 19) and Meghan Brady & Gideon Bok: Colors and the Kids at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through May 22). Kalm notes that [Katz's] "drawings are all from the last couple of years and feature studies of friends and family. […]
Rosemarie Beck’s The Tempest
Eric Sutphin considers painter Rosemarie Beck's artistic engagement with Shakespeare's The Tempest. Sutphin writes: "Within the complex social climate of the [The Tempest], Prospero is the artist who mediates material and concept. Throughout the play, he shifts from benevolent to tyrannical—he is both a loving father to Miranda, and the manipulative captor of Caliban and […]
Andrea Belag: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Andrea Belag. Belag remarks: "How important is it to be strictly abstract? That's something that's on my mind. These teeter towards something else and how much of that am I going to let in? … I'm suspending rules and beliefs right now to see how […]
Vigée Le Brun @ The Met
Mario Naves reviews the recent exhibition Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Naves writes: "Vigée Le Brun would never altogether shed a brittleness of affect—the conventionality of her settings is a nagging constant—but the painterly approach became more fluid and precise. Rubens was a pivotal […]