Louise Belcourt: Studio Visit
John Yau reflects on a visit to the studio of painter Louise Belcourt. Yau writes: "There is the faintest hint of anguished tension running through Belcourt’s paintings, which belies the solid planes of color filling her surfaces. At one point, I began focusing on the fissures and gaps spreading through her tightly constructed compositions. Later, […]
Rubens and His Legacy
Jackie Wullschlager reviews Rubens and his Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne, Royal Academy, London, on view through April 10, 2015. Wullschlager writes: "… politically incorrect, though wonderful, is the show’s second Rubens masterpiece: the rare 'Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt' from Rennes, which as a story of tumult and conflict between civilisation and nature nicely […]
Erik Weisenburger @ Perimeter Gallery
Chris Miller reviews recent paintings by Erik Weisenburger at Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, on view through February 25, 2015. Miller writes: "These sixteen visions of life in the north woods take us into that cheerfully lonely natural world once celebrated in Thoreau’s 'Walden.' But there’s more whimsy than morality here, with no sense of the heroic […]
Irving Petlin @ Kent Fine Art
Eileen Jeng reviews the recent exhibition The Still Open Case of Irving Petlin: From the Years 1960 to 2012 at Kent Fine Art, New York. Jeng writes: "The dark-walled, dimly-lit front gallery at Kent Fine Art housed a re-creation of Petlin’s studio in Paris in 1960 – a desk and table with buckets of coated […]
Jake Berthot: Fellow Traveler
Deborah Barlow reflects on the work of artist Jake Berthot (1939-2014). Barlow writes that she finds Berthot's paitings "thoughtful and yet not cerebral. Berthot blends intelligent painting and powerful feeling. Standing in front of one of his works I am invariably struck by the herculean intention to bring something deeply authentic into form. Like his […]
Gianna Commito @ Rachel Uffner
Roberta Smith reviews paintings by Gianna Commito at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, on view through February 22, 2015. Smith writes: "The effect is of looking into a broken kaleidoscope, its elements askew in a shallow space. Sense cannot be made of this carefully worked out confusion and the shadowy hall-of-mirrors puzzles it creates, but […]
Kianja Strobert: Subversive Methods
William Corwin reviews Kianja Strobert: Of This Day In Time at The Studio Museum in Harlem, on view through March 8, 2015. Corwin writes: "In the tradition of Klein and Dubuffet, Strobert chooses to site her artistic practice within the confines of painting, while literally doing everything she can to reconfigure that discipline through a […]
Judith Duquemin: Interview
Charley Peters interviews artist Judith Duquemin about her work. Duquemin comments: "Whether it be analogue or conceptual reality, or abstract conceptual reality, sometimes referred to as virtual reality, we require a personal history of perceptual experience to respond to what we sense and perceive, and this can be applied to all notions of reality, with […]
Barbara Friedman on Lisa Yuskavage
Barbara Friedman considers Lisa Yuskavage's panting Faucet (1995). Friedman remarks: "Many contemporary women artists have reclaimed the depiction of the female nude as Yuskavage does. And many of today’s painters combine high and low sources: in her case, soft porn filtered through Baroque and Color Field painting. But few other artists allow the image that […]
Chance and Order
Andy Parkinson reviews the exhibition Chance and Order, recently on view at Eagle Gallery, London. The show featured works by Andrew Bick, Katrina Blannin, Natalie Dower, Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin, and Jeffrey Steele. Parkinson writes: "The show brings works from the 1960s and 1970s by the British Constructionist and Systems Group together with more recent […]
Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir
Shirine Saad posts Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir, a short film by Barbara Anastacio that features the painter discussing his work in his Paris Studio. In the video interview, conducted by Saad, Soulages comments: "…it's the light that's the real tool! Because it's always whatever is happening in the canvas that directs me. The reality of a work […]
Serge Poliakoff: Silent Paintings
Harry Thorne reviews Serge Poliakoff: Silent Paintings at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, on view through February 21, 2015. Thorne writes that the "works [exhibited] pose a strong defence to any claims that Poliakoff’s abstraction – and all abstraction for that matter – is nothing but the visual reification of the random. Each canvas is perfectly […]
Peter Blume: Nature & Metamorphosis
Edward M. Epstein reviews Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, on view through April 12, 2015. Epstein writes: "Precisionism, Surrealism, abstraction, and Pop art all have their moment in the painting and drawing of this lesser-known American artist, who is now getting his due with the Academy’s retrospective… […]
James Ensor @ the Art Institute of Chicago
Mark Pohlad reviews Temptation: The Demons of James Ensor at The Art Institute of Chicago, on view through January 25, 2015. Pohlad writes: "Ensor’s six-foot-tall drawing 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony,' 1887, is the exhibition’s thematic and physical centerpiece, set like an altarpiece at the end of a dark, chapel-like corridor. It’s a dense tangle […]
Sarah McEneaney: Interview
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Sarah McEneaney. McEneaney comments: "My paintings are totally and purposefully autobiographical, but are also edited, embellished, and fantasized. It is not true documentary in any way. There are things I am really out there about. I have made work about traumatic events in my life. But there are also things that […]
Van Gogh: Courage & Cunning
Michael Kimmelman reviews the new book Van Gogh: A Power Seething (Icons) by Julian Bell, published by New Harvest. Kimmelman observes that "Bell has written what he describes, rightly, as an 'unmystified' and compassionate biography. It follows the encyclopedic biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, published in 2011, a painstaking, brilliant, almost ceaselessly […]
Katherine Bernhardt: Interview
Ashley Garrett interviews painter Katherine Bernhardt. Bernhardt comments: "I have always tried to use images in my life that I always see. I was trying to make the dumbest or the funniest painting that I could make. The stupidest dumbest craziest and funniest—combining imagery out there from today … Overload of imagery in Flatbush, things […]
Jean Hélion on Painting
John Goodrich reviews Double Rhythm: Writings About Painting by Jean Hélion, edited by Deborah Rosenthal (Arcade Publishing). Goodrich notes that "[Hélion's]emphasis on the primal forces of painting and the artist’s improvisational engagement with them — 'The created form becomes creative' — suggests the free-form give-and-take of Abstract Expressionism. But whereas Ab-Ex looked to enveloping sensations, […]
Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015)
Nicole Rudick remembers painter Jane Wilson (1924 – 2015) who passed away this week. Rudick writes: "The strata of distant land in [Wilson's] paintings lie like silt at the bottom of a river and remind me of the colored stripes of earth in Malevich’s Red Cavalry. 'I have conquered the lining of the colored sky,' […]
Devin Powers @ Lesley Heller
Roberta Smith reviews Through the Valley: New Paintings by Devin Powers at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on view through February 1, 2015. Smith writes that Power's paintings "muster an elaborate physicality while corralling a profusion of references to different cultures, mediums and artifacts within their irregular borders. They might more logically be called painted reliefs, […]