Figure
Clear as Doubt: Bernardo Siciliano at Aicon Gallery
Beyond their doubts, Siciliano’s paintings esteem the powerful legacy of Italian figurative art and its place in contemporary art.
Interview: Sedrick Huckaby at the Elaine de Kooning House
John Mitchell talks to Sedrick Huckaby about paintings in progress during a recent residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton, New York.
Mimesis Unbound: Noah Buchanan at Dacia Gallery
The magical display of rendering form from flatness underlines the primary power of all painting.
Susan Lichtman: Interview
Savvy Painter Podcast
Antrese Wood talks to painter Susan Lichtman about her work. Discussing how she constructs a painting, Lichtman remarks: “The idea is that I’m trying … to eventually make a space where your eyes move from one thing and to another and to another, the way they do when you look through a space. You don’t […]
Devastatingly Human
New York Review of Books
Jenny Uglow reviews All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life at the Tate Britain through August 27, 2018. Uglow begins: “The gripping and dramatic show … merits its title: it is ‘all too human’ in the tender, painful works that form its core. But ‘a century of painting life’ promises something wider—does it smack […]
Paris/New York/Nexus
James Kalm Rough Cut
James Kalm visits Paris/New York/Nexus at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through April 15, 2018. The show features works by Balthus, Leland Bell, Anne Harvey, Jean Helion, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Bob Thompson, and Robert De Niro Sr. Kalm notes: “This presentation focuses on a select group of figurative artists who formed connections […]
Designing Women: Kurt Kauper at Almine Rech
Margaret McCann reviews an exhibition of works by Kurt Kauper at Almine Rech.
Alix Bailey: Interview
The Studio Visit
John Mitchell interviews painter Alix Bailey. An exhibition of recent paintings by Bailey is on view at The Painting Center, New York, through February 24, 2018. Bailey comments: “Right now I’m painting mostly larger longer-term paintings of the whole figure and I’m changing the way that I work. I’ve become increasingly interested in finding a […]
Heather Morgan: Interview
The Studio Visit
John Mitchell interviews painter Heather Morgan on the occasion of her exhibition Heavenly Creatures at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through January 28th, 2018. Morgan comments: “The figures I paint today still tend to be eccentric, fringe of society characters, larger than life… I get excited by raw displays of emotion, the […]
Cecily Brown: Interview
Brooklyn Rail
Jason Rosenfeld interviews painter Cecily Brown on the occasion of her recent exhibition A Day! Help! Help! Another Day! at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Brown observes: “It would be ironic if this horrible period in our history was producing really good art, for a change. I’m uncomfortable talking about something too specific to my […]
Dana Schutz: Building the Boat While Painting
The Nation
Barry Schwabsky reviews an exhibition of works by Dana Schutz at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and subsequently reflects on Schutz’s controversial painting of Emmett Till shown in the recent Whitney Biennial. Schwabsky observes: “It’s in the gap between what can be imagined and what can be represented that art’s capacity for surprise is […]
Alex Katz: Interview
Studio International
Anna McNay interviews painter Alex Katz whose work is on view at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London through November 18, 2017. Katz remarks: “Everything is moving. There’s no reality, it’s moving. Reality is subject to fashion and so you get something where there’s no past tense, there’s no future tense, there’s only now. And I want […]
Rachel Rickert at E.TAY Gallery
artcritical
Roman Kalinovski reviews Rachel Rickert: The Ins and Outs at E.TAY Gallery, New York, on view through October 7, 2017. Kalinovski writes: “The strange pleasure that comes from visual frustration is a recurring theme in this exhibition. While Soft Boundaries and Verge present its two extremes with the curtain drawn and closed, respectively, and the […]
Aubrey Levinthal @ Nancy Margolis Gallery
Gorky's Granddaughter
Zachary Keeting and Christopher Joy interview painter Aubrey Levinthal at her exhibition at Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, on view through October 14, 2017. Levinthal remarks: “I like paintings … that when you look at first, it’s inviting, it feels good to look … but then there’s something to hold you into the painting … […]
State of the Art in American Figurative Painting
D/Railed
Daniel Maidman observes the topic of contemporary figure painting through the work of three painters: Yedidya Hershberg, Eric Fischl, and Heather Morgan. Maidman begins: “The field [of figurative painting] is enormous and shows almost no conceptual or procedural unity. One’s only hope, in approaching the topic overall, is to build up a mosaic of specifics, […]
Judith Linhares: Studio Visit
Gorky's Granddaughter
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting visit the studio of painter Judith Linhares. Linhares remarks: “I think of myself as a populist and I love the idea of communicating with a lot of people through images… I am interested in the figures … representing more than a portrait … something that stands for a group.”
Philip Pearlstein on Piero della Francesca
Painters on Paintings
Philip Pearlstein reflects on his transformation from an abstract expressionist to a figurative painter, a change owed in part to the study of Piero della Francesca. Pearlstein recalls that Piero’s work “seemed to me to provide a kind of grammar of pictorial invention, parallel to the grammatical constructions of language that adventurous poets play with; […]
Janice Nowinski @ John Davis Gallery
Hyperallergic
John Goodrich reviews Janice Nowinski: Paintings at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: “In her third show at John Davis Gallery, Nowinski continues to combine a distinctly ‘low,’ unpolished approach with high ambitions for painting. The artist’s fairly conventional motifs — figures posed in landscapes and interiors […]
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits
The New Yorker
Zadie Smith profiles painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose exhibition Under-Song For A Cipher is on view at the New Museum, New York through September 3, 2017. Smith writes: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character […]
Thaddeus Radell: Essays in the Epic
Painting Perceptions
John Goodrich reviews Thaddeus Radell: Hard Rain at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, on view through June 18, 2017. Goodrich writes: “Throughout these paintings, the candid attempts and re-attempts to define each subject become, in effect, stories of their own: encapsulated histories of a transcendental quest. Radell’s work, in short, revels in the epic […]