An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, May 1, 2026
Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / On a recent trip to Japan, I visited Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. Behind the museum’s massive burnt orange Torii gate, in the Higashiyama Cube, is its special exhibition, “Nihonga Avant-Garde: Kyoto 1948–1970” which, in the cube’s labyrinthine interior, encompasses three of Kyoto’s significant 20th-century avant-garde art movements (Pan Real, Cella Art Association, and the Sozo Bijutsu), propelled by a disaffection with traditional Nihonga painting.
Contributed by Tena Saw / Emily Kraus’s paintings are stuttering fields of glitches and agitation that shake and swagger like a Warhol Elvis. Her debut New York solo exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca arrives with a kind of procedural mythology already attached. The artist works inside a self-designed apparatus, feeding raw canvas through rollers, painting in collaboration with the machine. The paintings come into being from pressure, friction, and chance.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The art caper is a rich sub-genre of the crime film, populated by some clever and inventive movies. Customarily, they’ve focused on the complexity of a heist; think of Topkapi, Gambit, or Oceans Twelve. More recent ones – The Best Offer, The Burnt Orange Heresy, and The Mastermind – have delved fastidiously into the mentalities of the thieves or fraudsters, and in particular their perverse but rarely inauthentic relationships to beauty. Now there’s one in that vein from Steven Soderbergh, who also directed Oceans Twelve. The Christophers is slick and penetrating…
Contributed by Matthew Logsdon / Upon entering “Leech,” Kari Cholnoky’s third solo exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, one of the first sculptures encountered is Conservation of Mass, a cranial-like form of smooth, peach-colored alabaster atop a steel pedestal. It is vertically symmetrical, with the most protruding elements centered like noses, creating a ribbed topography of ridges and recesses that suggest a face. The casual viewer is afforded just enough space between the sculpture and the wall to peek around the back of the piece but not enough to see it from eye level. An especially bold and engaged visitor, though, would find a wisdom tooth resting within a fleshy cavity. Is this the physical record of bodily alteration? Part of a strategy of removing superfluous body parts? Conservation of Mass embodies mortal life: confrontation, cat and mouse, meat and bone. There’s acknowledgment that sometimes something needs to be cut out to salvage the whole.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Few artists – even among those dedicated to the landscape – would look at a body of water and think, “OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 years painting this.” Yet, year by year, Eric Wolf has done just that, driven by a fascination with the daily transformation of water’s surface, its complementary relationship to air, its connection with people, and the peculiarly seductive power of black ink on paper. “Two Waters,” on view at Abri Mars, spans three decades of Wolf’s en plein air ink painting, which he did exclusively at two sites: a pond in Chatham, New York, and a lake in Rangeley, Maine.
Contributed by Bill Arning / “Self Made: A Century of Inventing,” now on view at the American Folk Art Museum, asks a thorny question: Why does the descriptive term “self-taught” continue to resonate so strongly with dedicated fans of folk and outsider art? At its most basic, the term describes artists who did not attend traditional art schools. To be sure, these institutions embody uneasy contradictions. Tasked with encouraging free expression, they simultaneously prepare artists to attract patronage by targeting the moneyed class. But at their best, they embed young artists in an ongoing, object-based cultural conversation. So why are we so drawn to work that emerges outside their influence?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In May, Two Coats of Paint welcomes the return of Gyan Shrosbree from Fairfield, Iowa. Gyan, who had residencies in 2016 and 2017, makes clothing that she combines with twentieth-century modernist painting in an idiosyncratic and inventive practice that includes collaborative activities like sewing with her mother and staging exhibitions in the form of fashion shows. The closet, she declares, is her field of possibility. For Shrosbree, clothing is both practical and symbolic. It protects our bodies from the environment while projecting something about our inner life. It’s this duality that gives her bold paintings their emotional charge.
Contributed by Sutton Allen / With his show at Donald Ryan Gallery, E.M. Saniga join the esteemed company of artists who have eschewed fashion for the sake of personal vision. His real kin are Albert Pinkham Ryder and Courbet. He and Courbet are both interested in the raw beauty of country life yet also share an urbane sensibility. Saniga’s experience is made tactile through carefully modeled half tones and a calculated and surprising facture.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Branded a degenerate artist for his “insane childish scrawling” by the Nazis, Paul Klee, once anointed at the Bauhaus, left Germany for Switzerland in 1933. Scleroderma was already affecting his will and ability to paint, and his theretofore prodigious output waned. But as Germany’s onslaught in Europe effloresced into World War II, he regained purpose and productivity, yielding over 1,250 works in 1939, the year before his death. During this period, he downplayed his signature sublimation via color in favor of succinct line to expose the toxicity of fascism. Everything that concerned him as a citizen of the world seemed to catch light in his art. This valedictory turn is the subject of “Other Possible Worlds,” the Jewish Museum’s superbly curated show, uniquely centered on his final decade.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / In blues, there’s a tradition of over-practice, the idea being that the same song played thousands of times, and thus mastered, might yield something new about its nature, revealing a hidden room. My own artistic bias has long been to err on the side of underdevelopment. Ken Resseger, who was a student of mine over 25 years ago, back then overpainted. But, while his work could be labored, it often opened an entirely new world. As an older, seasoned painter, he has become something of a visionary in the very American vein of Martin Johnson Heade – a naturalist who painted exotic, realistic, yet unnatural landscapes.
Contributed by Peter Schroth / Some subjects are immune to age or aesthetic trends. Like the sprout that powers through the crack in the sidewalk, plant life in general and flowers in particular are irrepressible inspirations for art and have breached the territories of artists primarily known for other, more rigorous forms, from Piet Mondrian to Amy Sillman. Ruby Palmer’s show “Garden Theory” at Morgan Lehman Gallery demonstrates yet again that flowers are forever.
Contributed by William Corwin / The paintings of Sam Jablon now on view at Morgan Presents produce delicious sentient confusion. The neural circuits devoted to looking at an image get crossed with those used to read text. We find the words, but, in Jablon’s hands, we don’t know what to do with them. Fuck, for example, a little 18-inch square painting in solid yellow with blue with black lettering, seems less about sex and more about the frustrated expletive. Or perhaps it’s a cold command, broken down into two letters on top, F and U, and two letters below, C and K. We also fix…
Contributed by David Carrier / “Miró and the United States,” now up at The Phillips Collection, offers a useful take on an important, much-discussed issue: the origins of Abstract Expressionism. Joan Miró (1893–1983) taught many Americans how to make a successful abstract painting. Between the First and Second World Wars, when American artists were finding themselves, Miró’s work was a welcome and beneficial influence. The Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso and Matisse’s works from the early twentieth-century may have been greater. But, like Kandinsky, Miró provided…
Contributed by John Goodrich / Is it possible for a painter to celebrate both the traditions of great painting and her own spontaneously observed surroundings? […]
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took Amtrak down to Philadelphia and arrived there in 90 minutes, about the same amount of time it takes to go from Coney Island to MoMA by subway. I was celebrating my last few days of Spring Break, my terminal lust for abstraction, and the lifelong friendship with two artists, Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg, exhibiting together at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in a show titled “between earth and sky.”
The Nihonga avant-garde’s cultural outreachEmily Kraus: Balancing control and surrenderThe Christophers: NFSKari Cholnoky: Stalking dullnessEric Wolf: Into the fogFolk Art’s faux-ish innocenceTwo Coats Resident Artist Gyan Shrosbree, May 5 – 10E.M. Saniga: Country life vigorously observedPaul Klee, degenerate for the agesKen D. Resseger: Closer to creationRuby Palmer: Flowers are foreverSam Jablon’s delicious confusion
