Jonas Wood: Interview
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Jonas Wood. Wood remarks: "It is about how you set up a challenge. Sometimes you only need a couple things to challenge yourself, and other times you need one hundred. I like to have a lot of things going on in the studio the same time – different images and sizes. […]
Old Guys Painting
David Salle considers "late style" painting in three recent exhibitions: Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and Malcolm Morley at Sperone Westwater, and Georg Baselitz: Drinkers and Orange Eaters at Skarstedt. Salle begins: "Painting is one of the few things in life for which youth holds no advantage. The diminutions wrought by aging—of muscle mass, […]
Allison Katz: Interview
Frances Loeffler interviews artist Allison Katz whose exhibition All is On will be on view at Kunstverein Freiburg from September 18 – November 1, 2015. Katz remarks: "I think painting has this amazing, vulnerable, open-door policy and quality of permission. You can technically always re-enter a painting, that is almost part of the pact of […]
Keltie Ferris: Interview
Jason Stopa interviews painter Keltie Ferris whose work is on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, through October 17, 2015. Ferris comments: "I want to use painting's full arsenal. You can indulge in incredible color in painting, so why wouldn't you? Illusionistic qualities—I never understood why that wasn't part of the Greenbergian arsenal. It's […]
Hilma af Klint & the Spiritual in an Artist
David Carrier reviews the book Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible, edited by Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage (Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2015). Although finding certain aspects of the text wanting, Carrier concludes "Perhaps … to understand af Klint we need to avoid a rigid distinction between spiritualist diagrams and abstract painting. After […]
David Hockney: Interview
Lita Barrie reviews David Hockney: Painting and Photography at LA Louver (on view through September 19, 2015) and talks to David Hockney and Peter Goulds about the painting, photography, and digital media. Barrie writes: "Hockney's new work is a playful critique of the limitations of photography, that captures fascinating things a fixed perspective can never […]
Alexi Worth on Jan van Eyck
Alexi Worth considers Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment (ca. 1435 – 40) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Worth begins: "For the past few years this has been the painting I visit most often. I love how concentrated it is—as if the biggest painting in the Met had […]
Matthew Lopas: Interview
Sam King interviews painter Matthew Lopas whose exhibition (Un)Distorted: Perceptual Paintings, is on view at the Arts & Sciences center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff, AR, through December 5, 2015. Lopas comments: "There is a great deal of painting that I love, have looked at, and learned from. But resonance is something different from that. […]
Drawing the Curtain
Kathryn Murphy considers the motif of the curtain in painting in works by Adriaen van der Spelt, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Gerhard Richter. Murphy writes: "Leon Battista Alberti, in his De pictura (1435), famously recommended that a painting be conceived as an open window through which its subject – the historia – might […]
Marguerite Hohenberg & Medard Klein
Chris Miller reviews Marguerite Hohenberg & Medard Klein: The Guggenheim Years at Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago, on view through September 13th, 2015. Miller writes: "Marguerite Hohenberg (1883-1972) and Medard Klein (1905-2002) were two Chicago abstract artists who enjoyed national recognition in their heydays but vanished from view soon thereafter. In this show of works on […]
Susan Jane Walp at Tibor de Nagy
Sharon Butler previews Susan Jane Walp: Paintings on Paper at Tibor de Nagy, New York, on view from September 10 – October 17, 2015. Butler writes that Walp's "still life paintings on paper conjure both the extraordinary flower paintings that Manet made on his sickbed in 1882, and Morandi's remarkable still lifes. If anything can […]
Jack Tworkov: The Anti-Expressionist
Thomas Micchelli reviews Jack Tworkov: Mark and Grid at Alexander Gray Associates, New York, on view through October 24, 2015. Micchelli writes: "One of the many striking works in the exhibition … is a large abstraction from 1977 called “Knight Series #8 (Q3-77 #2).” Resembling a Synthetic Cubist floor plan, it is in fact an […]
Stockwell Depot 1967-1979
Corinna Lotz reviews Stockwell Depot 1967-1979 at The Stephen Lawrence Gallery and Project Space and the Heritage Gallery in the University of Greenwich Galleries through September 12, 2015. Lotz also interviews exhibition curator Sam Cornish about the show. In the interview Cornish notes that "the Depot was first set-up in 1967 by sculptors from St […]
On Wolf Kahn
Christopher Volpe writes about the paintings of Wolf Kahn. Volpe notes: "That Kahn’s work is 'pleasing' (he’s likely the most popular colorist in America) belies its unsentimental formalism. In fact, his fields of blazing color are deeply nuanced and almost as a rule moderated by subtle countering complexities applied in complements, neutrals and composite grays. […]
Hilma af Klint: Spiritualism & Aesthetics
Altoon Sultan blogs about the paintings of Hilma Af Klint. Sultan writes: "The seeds of this work was in a spiritualist group that she and four women friends formed in the 1890s, called The Five, where they would practice automatic drawing. A spiritualist medium was one profession in which women excelled and were respected. And […]
This Is What Tomorrow Looks Like: On Painting
Bradley Rubenstein reflects on paintings shows from the past season and looks forward to several upcoming shows including: Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden The New Museum (through Sept 9), Magalie Guérin at Lyles & King (Sept 8–Oct 4), Brenda Goodman: Selected Work 1961–2015 at the College for Creative Studies, Center Galleries, Detroit (Nov 14–Dec 19), […]
Agnes Martin at Tate Modern
Nicholas Spice reviews a retrospective exhibition of works by painter Agnes Martin, on view at Tate Modern through October 11, 2015. Spice writes: "It is often remarked about our engagement with Martin’s paintings that we are uncertain, when standing in front of them, where they reside. There are said to be three basic viewing positions: […]
George Caleb Bingham @ the Met
Mario Naves reviews Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through September 20, 2015. Naves observes that "the centerpiece [of the exhibition] is Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), a staple of the Met’s collection and the exhibition’s sine qua non. Bingham’s masterpiece […]
Frank Stella: Profile
Nadja Sayej profiles painter Frank Stella. A retrospective of Stella's work will be on view at the Whitney Museum, New York, from October 30, 2015 – February 7, 2016. Sayej writes: "Even though his work has evolved drastically – from monochromatic to colorful, sculpted to fabricated – Stella cringes at the word 'reinvented'. 'I don’t […]
Paintings of Moholy-Nagy
Christopher Knight reviews Paintings of Moholy-Nagy: The Shape of Things to Come at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, on view through September 27, 2015. Knight writes that the "exhibition centers on Moholy-Nagy's paintings, a medium he set aside as old-fashioned for a few years but picked up again in the early 1930s. He experimented […]