Andrew Holmquist @ Carrie Secrist
Kelly Reaves reviews Andrew Holmquist: Stage Left at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, on view through March 12, 2016. Reaves writes that in his new works, Holmquist's makes a "subtle nod to the human body, which provides a reference point for the artist as he composes the paintings. A hand here, a foot there and voila! […]
Robert Berlind: Interview
Robert Kushner interviews painter Robert Berlind who passed away December 17, 2015. Berlind comments: "Delacroix said that art goes from soul to soul. This counters the notion of the importance of language and semiotics, that something leaped across all of that and there’s a real deep occurrence. I’m interested in the phenomenology of looking at […]
Ken Kewley @ Gross McCleaf Gallery
Kitty Caparella reviews works by Ken Kewley at Gross-McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia, on view through February 26, 2016. Caparella writes that in these recent works Kewley "uses the spirograph, a fancy name for the plastic geometric stencil, to make circles, stars, and curves. It’s a device used by architects and children alike… In 'Large Still Life […]
Gina Beavers: Interview
Gwendolyn Zabicki interviews painter Gina Beavers. Beavers comments: "I will make a painting from any source. I try to be very democratic about it. If it seems interesting, I’ll make it … If I painted directly from the photograph, I would just paint photo-realistically. But, I was looking for some kind of painting language, and […]
Martha Diamond @ Alexandre Gallery
Stephen Maine reviews Martha Diamond: Recent Paintings at Alexandre Gallery, New York, on view through February 13, 2016. Maine writes: "Individually and collectively, [Diamond's recent] paintings span a spectrum of pictorial experience, ranging from the linguistic to the lushly material; Diamond construes them as both symbol and surface but avoids any sense that she’s equivocating… […]
Carolanna Parlato @ Elizabeth Harris
Sharon Butler blogs about Carolanna Parlato: A Delicate Balance at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on view through February 13, 2016. Butler writes that in Parlato's new paintings "dense geometric spaces, sloppy translucency, and highly saturated color of previous work have been gently nudged aside by opaque pastel color, the introduction of modeling paste for […]
John Walker: Looking Out to Sea
Stephen Truax reviews the recent exhibition John Walker: Looking Out to Sea at Alexandre Gallery, New York. Truax writes: "Twelve large-format canvases—all of which feature interlocking zig-zag patterns (a shorthand for the crests of water on the surface of the sea?)—were made exclusively inside his studio, a departure for Walker, who regularly begins his works […]
Mandy Lyn Ford: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of artist Mandy Lyn Ford. In her artist statement Ford writes: "My paintings are remnants of my life, tactile diaries. I beat them into submission by working them over and over and over; laying them on the floor, and dragging them, and applying and unapplying, cutting into […]
Susan Lichtman: Interview
Larry Groff interviews painter Susan Lichtman. Lichtman remarks: "I am … influenced by cinematography–the way we experience places in films; scanning and focusing over a duration of time. I want to make paintings that are more like cinematographic passages than like still photographs, where the eye can move around and apprehend things slowly… I resist […]
Barbara Zucker on Florine Stettheimer
Barbara Zucker reflects on Florine Stettheimer's Family Portrait II (1933) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Zucker writes that Family Portrait II "is a luscious poem of a painting, with a huge bouquet of flowers floating center stage in a surreal, dreamy space, a device Stettheimer would use often… Each […]
Robert Berlind: Interview
Elena Sisto's summer 2015 interview with painter Robert Berlind. Berlind passed away this past December. Berlind remarks: "There’s a point where I don’t even know I’m painting. You just work, you’re just doing—you look and you know what to do next and you just keep doing what you need to do. And then you back […]
Sharon Butler @ Theodore:Art
Patrick Neal reviews an exhibition of recent paintings by Sharon Butler at Theodore:Art, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through February 14, 2016. Neal writes: "Butler has … been a practitioner and proponent of a style of painting she dubbed 'The New Casualism,' which she characterizes as 'the rising inclination of artists to explore the metaphorical implications […]
Jan van Eyck @ the Met
Jason Farago reviews A New Look at a Van Eyck Masterpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through April 24, 2016. Farago writes that this focused exhibition, "highly specialized yet not inaccessible, undertakes a forensic probe into the Met’s van Eycks as well as a seemingly related drawing, rediscovered in 2012 […]
“Painter-painter,” and the Lingering Specter of Greenberg
Through the lens of two similar, recent exhibitions The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Variations: Conversations in and around Abstract Painting at LACMA, Lilly Lampe asks: "Is the supposed crisis in painting a product of the medium’s own neurosis? Perhaps it isn’t that painting […]
Robert Ryman: Quietude Paintings
Peter Malone reviews works by Robert Ryman at at Dia:Chelsea (through June 18) and Dia: Beacon (ongoing). Malone writes: "Ryman’s work is often spoken of in terms of a pronounced quietude, but a full appreciation of its extended roots—effectively accomplished in the two Dia shows—can enrich the experience… The Chelsea show concentrates on color, highlighting […]
Sebastian Black: Working Against Logic
Alex Bacon reviews Sebastian Black: Tales I Knows recently on view at CLEARING, Brooklyn, New York. Bacon writes that "[Black] made this series by working from projected JPEG reproductions of paintings that he first produced at a small scale the summer prior. The color is inevitably off in these cast images, and the size has […]
On Flatness & Plastic Space
Finding much of the work wanting in the recent exhibition Hoyland, Caro, Noland at Pace Gallery, London, Robin Greenwood considers the comparably positive qualities in 15th and 16th century Flemish paintings. Greenwood observes that "the hackneyed processes evident in the Pace Gallery work – all of it, from the laying-out horizontally of plates of unmanipulated […]
Fred Valentine @ Schema Projects
Jonathan Stevenson reviews Fred Valentine: The Pumpkin Festival and other Portraits at Schema Projects, Bushwick, on view through February 28, 2016. Stevenson writes: "All of Valentine's subjects are presented as slightly disoriented, not quite fitting in the dark space from which they seem to escape or the surface they purport to occupy, unable to fully […]
Eric Aho: Ice Cuts
Christopher Volpe blogs about the exhibition Eric Aho: Ice Cuts at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth University, on view through March 13, 2016. Volpe writes: "A stark, angular void edges out the largely blank, skewed border of remaining white space in the canvases of Vermont painter Eric Aho’s series of Ice Cut paintings. To call these […]
Matt Phillips: Interview
Yevgeniya Baras interviews painter Matt Phillips whose exhibition Comfort Inn is on view at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York through February 6, 2016. Phillips comments: "For me, paintings are roughly equal parts body and mind. There is the seeing, thinking, and responding aspect of painting. And the other half is so physical -mixing, […]