Julie Heffernan @ Mark Moore Gallery
Megan Abrahams reviews Julie Heffernan's recent exhibition Pre-Occupations at Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City. Abrahams begins: "Dramatic, intense, surreal and rich with metaphor, Julie Heffernan’s recent series of large figurative tableaux transport us to an apparently post-apocalyptic place and time conceived from the artist’s imagination. In her elegantly realized, often disturbing vision, the earth’s environment […]
Henry Taylor: Interview
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Henry Taylor about his life and work. In her introduction Samet notest that Taylor's "paintings bear that emotional porosity. His painting world is his personal world, and our shared cultural world. He makes solo and group portraits of his brothers, his lovers and friends, and people truly living on the edge, […]
Andrew Wykes: Interview
Larry Groff interviews painter Andrew Wykes. Wykes comments: "I find looking and returning to the same subject over numerous sessions rewarding. I tend to go deep into a subject—not wide… Observation is vital. I have always got great enjoyment from seeing. I feel privileged that I have this gift to see. I also think it […]
Claire Sherman @ Kavi Gupta
Kelly Reaves reviews Claire Sherman: Funeral Mountain at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, on view through August 1, 2015. Reaves writes that the show "blends Romantic-era geological drama with mid-century action painting, modernizing it by default in the process… Half-inch-deep paint strokes are sliced with thin, tumbling lines, physically mimicking shattered boulders and scraped sand. They […]
Judith Dolnick & Lucy Mink on Color
Sharon Butler interviews painters Judith Dolnick & Lucy Mink about their thoughts on color. Dolnick's and Mink's paintings are on view at OUTLET, Bushwick, Brooklyn through June 28, 2015. Dolnick comments: "My choice of color is all very intuitive. One color calls for another. Encourages another. Mix as I go. You know, as I move […]
Peter Reginato: Rowdy Celebrations
John Yau reviews Peter Reginato: Fiction at Adelson Galleries, Boston, on view through August 21, 2015. Yau writes: "There is an infectious exuberance to the paintings — a feeling that they are trying to break out of their rectangles, as well as jump out of their skin — which doesn’t feel forced. In four of […]
Alison Hall: East of Blue
Steven Alexander blogs about Alison Hall: East of Blue at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through July 31, 2015. Alexander observes that show "reveals Hall's deep connection to the history of painting — the materials, processes, systems, and iconography, as well as the ritualized labor of traditional practice. While it might […]
A Realization of Clyfford Still
Anne Sassoon reconsiders the work of painter Clyfford Still. Sassoon writes: "Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; […]
Benjamin Butler: Interview
Ridley Howard interviews painter Benjamin Butler whose exhibition Another Tree, Another Forest was recently on view at Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna. Butler comments: "I used to be very interested in combining dissimilar art historical reference points, into singular paintings. It was definitely important for me to use a simple/modern subject matter, the landscape, as a […]
Vernacular @ Theodore:Art
Janet Goleas reviews Vernacular at Theodore:Art, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through July 19, 2015. The show features works by Eric Brown, Sharon Butler, Joyce Robins, and Andrew Seto. Goleas writes that the artists "approach abstraction with a shared sense of humility, materiality and ambiguity. Speaking in distinct but related painterly tongues, the works on view […]
Jill Nathanson: Fluid Measure
Piri Halasz reviews Jill Nathanson: Fluid Measure at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, on view through June 27, 2015. Halasz writes: "Nathanson’s shapes are bounded by edges that are sometimes straight, sometimes jagged, and occasionally rounded – all within the same picture. They look like pieces of paper that have been cut or torn, nor […]
Deborah Martin @ George Billis Gallery
Anise Stevens reviews Deborah Martin: The Slabs: The Last Free Place in America at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through July 11, 2015. Stevens writes: "Like Hopper’s paintings, Martin’s interpretations provide neither a critical nor celebratory stance. Rather, they evoke 'an emotional complexity nearly operatic in scope: with the silent, vacant architecture, human […]
Alex Katz: Interview
Faith McClure interviews painter Alex Katz on the occasion of the exhibition Alex Katz, This Is Now at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, on view through September 6, 2015. Katz comments: "Style makes everything cohesive. The old guys said style becomes content and content becomes form. That’s the abstract expressionism bible. In my paintings, […]
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern
Janet McKenzie reviews a retrospective exhibition of works by painter Agnes Martin, on view at Tate Modern through October 11, 2015. McKenzie notes that "[Martin's] works are composed of the simplest formal elements – ruled pencil lines and a limited number of forms, including grids, stripes and, occasionally, circles, triangles and squares, painted in a […]
Katharina Grosse @ Johan König
Anna Corrigan reviews the recent exhibition Katharina Grosse: The Smoking Kid at Johan König, Berlin. Corrigan observes: "Though this show engages with space and structure in a less explicit way than previous installations and sculpture-based exhibitions, Grosse’s placement of these large-scale paintings in a luminous and immensely spacious gallery successfully questions the relationship between incidental […]
Ellsworth Kelly: Painting into Sculpture
Blog post revisiting William Rubin's 1963 article “Ellsworth Kelly: The big form,” republished on the occasion of four recent exhibitions of Kelly's work at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. In the article Rubin wrote: "Working from flat Purist painting such as had been in vogue with the Abstraction-Creation group and the painters of the Réalités […]
Andrew Forge @ Betty Cuningham
Thomas Micchelli reviews works by Andrew Forge on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York through August 14, 2015. Micchelli writes: "'They take a long time to make.' That’s what the British artist and writer Andrew Forge said when he was 'questioned as to the meaning of his paintings,' … Such a brass-tacks perspective would […]
Peter Fox: Spinning Out a Readymade
Anne Sherwood Pundyk reviews Peter Fox: Blind Trust at Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, on view through June 21, 2015. Pundyk writes: "The melting ribbons of clear, bright color-groups represent hypothetical nations or advertise various emotional states. Owing to the addition of more water to thin the texture of the paint in the new […]
Robert Swain: Color Energy
James Kalm visits Robert Swain: Color Energy at Minus Space, Brooklyn, New York, on view through July 4, 2015. Kalm observes that "Swain's sophisticated system of color tones, and spatial relations is a unique direction of investigation, with an obsessive side that boarders on the eccentric. This suite of large paintings, produced specifically for the […]
Joan Nelson: Lost and Found
Sharon Butler blogs about the paintings of Joan Nelson on view Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon through July 13, 2015. Butler notes that "[Nelson's] use of color and value (warm deep browns in the foreground, faint blue-green-purples in the background) afford the images a great sense of distance while the little plant or spit of […]