Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Interview
Louisa Buck interviews painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Verses After Dusk is on view at Serpentine Gallery, London through September 13, 2015. Yiadom-Boakye comments: "For a long time now, I haven’t thought of what I do as portraits—I see them more as figurative paintings. I realised quite early on that I was not so interested […]
Porfirio DiDonna @ Elizabeth Harris
Darragh McNicholas reviews Porfirio DiDonna: Paintings from the 1970s at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on view through July 31, 2015. McNicholas writes:"… the 6-foot-tall Untitled (pdn63) (1976) dwarfs me. It’s a dark and unyielding expanse of blue-green, with thousands of miniscule dots horizontally positioned along an invisible grid, each dot the amber color of […]
Albert Oehlen’s Genius
Sharon Butler reviews Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden at the New Museum, New York, on view through September 13, 2015. Butler observes: "Oehlen isn’t a worrier. For him painting isn’t about developing a distinctive style or thinking too deeply about a particular shape or line; to the contrary, it’s about creating something unexpected and taking […]
Stanley Whitney @ the Studio Museum
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange at The Studio Museum Harlem on view through October 25, 2015. Schjeldahl writes: "The works present wobbly grids of variously sized and proportioned blocks of full-strength color in friezelike arrays, separated by brushy horizontal bands.. It’s as if, for each painting, Whitney had climbed a ladder and then […]
Studying with Elmer Bischoff
John Seed compiles recollections from the students of Elmer Bischoff, whose paintings are on view at the George Adams Gallery, New York, through August 30, 2015. One former student, Bruce Klein, comments: "In my studio I've tacked up this Bischoff quote: 'What is most desired in the final outcome is a condition of form which […]
Alex Katz @ the High Museum
Faith McClure reviews Alex Katz, This Is Now at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, on view through September 6, 2015. McClure observes: "What sets Katz apart from the long history of realism, as well as the great canon of abstractionists, is that, at his very best, he can achieve 'realness' through a completely unexpected […]
Ruth Root @ Andrew Kreps
Jonathan Stevenson blogs about works by Ruth Root at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, on view through August 14, 2015. Stevenson writes: "Each piece comprises two main elements – digitally-printed fabric of Root’s own design (involving dots, lines, and more elaborate shapes) and a Plexiglas panel enamel- and spray-painted in oblique reference to the pattern […]
Eric Brown: Playful Strategies
Rebecca Allan reviews the recent exhibition Eric Brown: Vice Versa at Ille Arts, Amagansett. Allan writes: "Brightly illuminated against the whitewashed walls of the gallery, the shimmying plaids and high-keyed, off-kilter stripes of these paintings have the pulsating energy of Scandinavian or African textiles. While their sources and influences are deep and varied, they strike […]
Avital Burg at Slag
Arts in Bushwick
Etty Yaniv reviews Avital Burg: Fancy Seeing You at Slag Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through August 9, 2015. Yaniv observes: "Each of Burg’s portraits evokes a distinct sense of staged theatrical drama, in which both the artist and her animate or inanimate models co-inhabit. She affirms that her models have to be people who […]
Eric Ravilious: Modern, English & Strange
Jenny Uglow reviews works by Eric Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, on view through August 31, 2015. Uglow writes that Ravilious "has been called a Romantic Modernist, and his sensibility belongs to a particular English fascination with form, a line that includes the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and the radical architects […]
Richard Dadd @ Watts Gallery
Julian Bell reviews The Art of Bedlam: Richard Dadd on view at Watts Galllery through November 1, 2015. Bell begins: "Portrait painting requires stillness. What, for the subject, is it like to be still? As far as one can tell, the gentleman facing Richard Dadd in 1853 had nothing that he wished to project: his […]
Ed Moses: Interview
Stephen J. Goldberg interviews painter Ed Moses on the occasion of two exhibitions: Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and 70s at LACMA (through August 2) and Ed Moses: Now and Then at William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica (through August 15). Moses comments: "I got interested in the grid from the crisscross action in certain […]
Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots
Anna McNay reviews Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at Tate Liverpool, on view through October 18, 2015. McNay writes: "it might be suggested that his lack of direct contact with the canvas meant there was no intermediary between it and the content of his mind – his canvas could be said to be at one with […]
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern
Charley Peters reviews the Agnes Martin retrospective at Tate Modern, on view through October 11, 2015. Peters notes that "Despite any of the vulnerability implied by the narratives surrounding her paintings, [the exhibition] is a vast, comprehensive survey of [Martin's] robust and relentless vision, best viewed by spending time with her paintings and not by dwelling for […]
Eating Painting
Eating Painting presents works that embody painting as an immersive sensory experience – the “consumption of paint as color and substance.”
John Ashberry on Joan Mitchell
Blog post revisiting John Ashberry's 1965 review of Joan Mitchell's paintings at Stable Gallery republished on the occasion of the exhibition Joan Mitchell: Retrospective, Her Life and Paintings at Kunsthaus Bregenz, on view through October 25, 2015. Ashberry observes: "The relation of [Mitchell's] painting and that of other Abstract-Expressionists to nature has never really been clarified. […]
Elmer Bischoff @ George Adams
Simon Carr reviews Elmer Bischoff: Figurative Paintings continues at George Adams Gallery, New York, on view through August 30, 2015. Carr writes: "Bischoff, like Park and Diebenkorn, made artworks about daily life in Northern California. Using strong colors and assertive marks, he made dynamic street scenes and interiors portraying figures interacting… In 'Figure with White […]
At the Hood: American Landscapes
Altoon Sultan considers American landscape paintings in the collection of the Hood Museum of Art. Sultan begins noting that many of the painters "depicted the local New Hampshire landscape, or that of New England. America––that vast 'virgin' land, unpeopled in the eyes of the European settlers, close to God in its awe inspiring grandeur––was a […]
Alex Katz in the 1950s
Phyllis Tuchman reviews Brand-New and Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s at the Colby College Museum of Art, on view through October 18, 2015. Tuchman observes: "Sixty-some years later, all the work still looks brand-new and terrific. As it was, these singular portraits, Maine landscapes, and uncluttered interiors never got their day in court. Katz, […]
Jennifer Wynne Reeves @ CB1 Gallery
David Pagel reviews Jennifer Wynne Reeves: A Bolt of Soul: Grooved Foreheads and Dog Teeth at CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through July 18, 2015. Pagel writes that Reeves' works "are suffused with more sadness than most would want to experience in a lifetime, much less an afternoon. But delight also enlivens Reeves’ juicy […]