Helen Frankenthaler & Morris Louis: Pours
Peter Schjeldahl reviews two exhibitions of color field painting: Helen Frankenthaler: Composing with Color at Gagosian Gallery and Morris Louis: Veils at Mnuchin Gallery. Both shows are on view through October 18, 2014. Schjeldahl concludes: "Color-field climaxed a modern ambition to expunge narrative content from painting. You were meant to be alone—“autonomous” was a byword—in wordless […]
Lee Krasner & Norman Lewis
Karen Rosenberg reviews From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945 – 1952 at the Jewish Museum, New York, on view through February 1, 2015. Rosenberg writes: "The show isn’t really a dialogue, in the conventional sense. But it bravely elides differences of gender, race and religion, finding that Krasner and Lewis — a […]
Malevich’s Absurdism
Noemi Smolik examines latent parody and absurdism in the work of Kazimir Malevich, on the occasion of the exhibition Malevich at Tate Modern, London, on view through October 26, 2014. Smolik writes: "In Moscow at the time, a whole generation of young artists, poets, musicians and scholars was revolting against the Western model of linear […]
Irving Sandler on Tenth Street Painting
artcritical
Franklin Einspruch interviews Irving Sandler about the Tenth Street painters and sculptors on the occasion of the exhibition Irving Sandler: Out of Tenth Street and Into the 1960s at Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, on view through October 11, 2014. Einspruch introduces the conversation by noting: "While there are only eight objects on display in […]
Lennart Anderson: Studio Visit
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy visit the studio of painter Lennart Anderson. Giving a tour of his studio, Anderson discusses a range of topics from the painting currently on his easel, to a painting he has been working on for 30 years, to working in spite of diminishing eye sight. "The idea that my eyes […]
Eric Aho: Interview
Jennifer Samet interviews painter Eric Aho. Commenting about granting himself permission to be "recklesss" in his work, Aho comments: "I have been describing 'the casual eye' for ten years. I don’t think I invented it, but it occurred to me in thinking about John Constable. Constable left London to come back home to Suffolk and […]
Anne Harris: Interview
Tina Engels interviews painter Anne Harris about her work. Harris comments: "I think painting is fundamentally perceptual. It’s experienced in a sensory way. I don’t mean just seeing. Touch, movement, memory, imagination and emotion—all can be understood as perception, and all are involved when making paintings and looking at paintings. Painting from life, which I […]
New Image Painting @ Shane Campbell
Alan Pocaro reviews the exhibition New Image Painting at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, on view through October 4, 2014. Pocaro writes that "is a stinging riposte to the kind of contemporary abstract painting that merely serves as 'a placeholder for value' and 'needs to get out of the way.' In its place, the show presents […]
Tomma Abts & Helene Appel
Sharon Butler blogs about two New York exhibitions: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner (through October 25) and Helen Appel at James Cohan (through October 4). Butler writes that both shows "certainly make a case that focus and exactitude are still meaningful approaches… [Abts] has begun to introduce ruptures, such as a diptych format and a cut […]
Van der Weyden’s Eternal Return
Peter Malone considers the "idea of an eternal return: a circular rather than linear sense of time" in Rogier Van der Weyden's The Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning (1530) in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Malone writes: "Standing before [the painting], I couldn’t shake the feeling that […]
Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden
Edo Dijksterhuis writes about the exhibtion Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, on view through January 4, 2015. Dijksterhuis notes: "The exhibition’s title is taken from a small, almost unassuming work from 1993. It shows a dark male figure carrying a white female. Dumas based the image on a still […]
The Ordinary Transfigured
Altoon Sultan muses on the "commonplace… gathered in perfect balance" in the paintings of Chardin and John F. Peto. Sultan notes: "When you look closely at a Chardin painting, like this one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you marvel at the tenderness and care taken to paint these details: the hair of a rabbit, […]
Ruth Pastine @ Brian Gross
David M. Roth reviews Ruth Pastine: MIND’S EYE / Sense Certainty Series at Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco, on view through October 25, 2014. Roth writes that "the latest offering from Ruth Pastine, turns the human body into a tuning fork. That sensation, familiar to her followers, comes from seamless color gradients applied to […]
Miracles in Miniature @ The Morgan
John Haber reviews the exhibition Miracles in Miniature: The Art of the Master of Claude de France at the Morgan Library, New York, on view through September 14, 2014. The Morgan website includes an online version of the show. Haber writes: "Along the walls run a calendar by the artist known only as the Master […]
Painting’s Enframement
Martin Mugar considers the question: "How does one paint in the context of society enframed by the technological and the commercial?" He notes that "painting, unlike our cyber-reality, [is the evocation] of personal time and [is] grounded in our body and mind. Painting still privileges the individual and their own notion of time. It is, […]
Gregory Botts: Madrid Group
Matthew Irwin reviews Gregory Botts: The Madrid Group, recently on view at David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Irwin writes that Botts’s work "provides a different reading of the public performance that is painting outdoors… Plenty of other Western artists depict landscape from within an abstract, or even conceptual, framework, but the work of […]
Anna Valdez: Interview
Samantha Alanna Wittwer interviews painter Anna Valdez about her work. Valdez comments: "I think people are products of their environments. What you tend to surround yourself with can become who you are, but it’s also the people you’re interacting with and the things that you’re experiencing. It’s all sort of a back and forth, not […]
Female Voices of Expressionism
UNFRAMED
Frauke Josenhans blogs “the work of three female artists who played a crucial role in the birth and evolution of Expressionism in the early 20th century” – Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, and Marianne Werefkin. Works by all three are on view in the exhibition Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky at […]
Russell Roberts: Studio Visit
Anne Russinof photo blogs a visit to the studio of painter Russell Roberts. Writing about Roberts work for a show at Heskin Contemporary, Jennifer Riley has noted: "Using fragments, layers, lines, drips, washes and erasures [Roberts'] oil paintings depict a stratified and changing world in which multiple formal differences and often opposing elements conjoin to […]
Clare Grill: Interview
Matt Kleberg interviews painter Clare Grill whose exhibition Petal, Pedal, Peddle will be on view at Fred Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, through October 4, 2014. Asked about when a painting is done, Grill comments that it's "when a painting looks back at you, when it has a face. When it has a presence, it says […]