Pictured: Paola Oxoa / Booth 1152, More Dusk Than Moth, Curated by Kari Adelaide, Vanessa Albury, and John Brooks. Artists include Vanessa Albury, John Brooks, Lorenzo De Los Angeles, Sarah Grass, Candice Ivy, Maki Kaoru, Paola Oxoa, Max Razdow, and Bob Szantyr.
Contributed by Fay Sanders / In its ninth year, SPRING/BREAK continues its tradition of turning mundane office spaces into elaborate and vibrant venues for art. This year more than 100 curators and 400+ artists took over two floors of the former Ralph Lauren offices on Madison Avenue to present their respective takes on this year�s theme of �IN EXCESS.� Some artists and curators embraced the cubicle-like surroundings by situating their work in the space as if it were a co-worker, and others transformed their space into a typical gallery environment. A few rendered the spaces unrecognizable as offices at all, using bold and pattern-heavy wallpaper, installation, and sculpture to engulf the space, suggesting a kind of art carnival. SPRING/BREAK includes work in all media, from traditional painting to interactive installations to disco balls made of teeth. There is an abundance of art to contemplate. Here are ten paintings that caught my eye.
Pictured: Colin Oulighan / Booth 1154, American Aikido (Akita), Curated by Joey Frank. Artists include Dean Cercone, Crystal Dyer, James J. A. Mercer, Luisa Alcantara, Georgica Pettus, Colin Oulighan, Noah D�Orazio, Wilmot Kidd, and Joey Frank. Pictured: Jac Lahav / Booth 1009, Just For The Taste Of It, Curated by Jac Lahav and Eli Bronner. Artists include Kris Rac, Hannah Barrett, Jeremy Olson, Max Razdow, Sara Shaoul, Paola Oxoa, Paul Gagner, Milo Thiesen, Jordan Buschur, Kumasi J. Barnett, Vick Quezada, Kristen Schiele, David B. Smith, Miguel Machado, Julia Oldham, Alex Stern, Sabra Embury, Harriet Salmon, Jeff Gibson, Alicia Gibson, Nia Thomas, Michael Gittes, Kukula, Adam Douglas Thompson. Pictured: James Williams / Booth 1160, Book Club Artists, Curated by Dominic Terlizzi + Christine Stiver. Artists include Dominic Terlizzi + Christine Stiver + Thomas Dahlberg + Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann + James Williams III +Madeline Cutrona Pictured: Jeremy Olson / Booth 1046, To Scale: Friends and Neighbors, Curated by Vanessa Albury. Artists include Jeremy Olson. Pictured: Iva Kinnaird/ Booth 1041, Curated by Trale Tevis Blattocene. Artists include Iva Kinnaird and Shelby David Meier. Pictured: Margaux Valengin/ Booth 1003, Somersault, Curated by Julie Curtiss. Artists include Margaux Valengin. Pictured: Kate Klingbeil/ Booth 1065, Burrowed, Curated by Jacob Rhodes, Rachel Frank and Kristen Racaniello. Artists include Kate Klingbeil. Pictured: James J. A. Mercer / Booth 1154, American Aikido (Akita), Curated by Joey Frank. Artists include Dean Cercone, Crystal Dyer, James J. A. Mercer, Luisa Alcantara, Georgica Pettus, Colin Oulighan, Noah D�Orazio, Wilmot Kidd, and Joey Frank. Pictured: Liz Collins / Booth 1007 Over The Edge: A Sensualist Manifesto, Curated by Jane Ursula Harris. Artists include Liz Collins.
SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC 2020, Atlantic Production Center, 625 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. Through Monday, March9, 2020.
About the author: Fay Sanders, based in Brooklyn, graduated from the Brooklyn College MFA program in 2019. Her paintings have been included in exhibitions at 601ArtSpace and Flux Factory, and she was recently an artist-in-residence at MassMOCA.
NOTE: TheTwo Coats of Paint 2023 Year-End Fundraising campaign is in the final weeks. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to help keep the conversation going in 2024. If you contribute (or have contributed) more than $150, we will send you a gift — a TCOP mug. Thank you, readers! Click here to contribute.
On the occasion of “A Legacy of Making: 21 Contemporary Italian American Artists,” a sprawling...
Two Coats on Instagram
Click to enlarge -->
Details from Brice Marden’s last paintings, on view @gagosian UES. Pencil grid, underpainting, brush hairs, drool, shaky hand. Poignant end to a painting story. #bricemarden #underpaintings #workinprogress
If you’re in DUMBO today to “shop the studios,” swing by and pick up a couple of the new Two Coats of Paint coffee mugs. 15 bucks each. Venmo sharon-butler-15 and reserve for pick up 😀 Thanks for supporting Two Coats of Paint!
Latest post, link in profile / NYC Selected Gallery Guide: Dec 2023 / Hey galleries and artists! If you have enjoyed being included in our NYC Selected Gallery Guide and find it a helpful way to promote your exhibitions, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Two Coats of Paint. Kick a few bucks into our annual year-end fund drive to support the project in 2024. If you have already contributed, thank you — you’re helping to keep the conversation going. A link to make a contribution is in the profile.
Latest post, link in profile / Note that the Two Coats of Paint Selected Gallery Guide now includes listings for galleries in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Welcome to the Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide! Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / What’s up out of town? At Jack Shainman The School in Kinderhook, take some time at the sprawling installation by Meleko Mokgosi, co-director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking at Yale. Employing a range of media dense with meaningful images and ideas, the show explores the theme of subjugation. Also in Kinderhook, stop by SEPTEMBER for “Of Waves,” a two-person abstraction exhibition featuring London-based Jane Bustin and Hudson Valley-based Anne Lindberg. The two painters investigate the things we can feel but can’t see or touch.
Carrie Haddid has an elegant group landscape show called “Vanishing Point.” Also in a landscape mode but perhaps less somber is Mary Breneman’s bold landscapes at D’Arcy Simpson, which recall Marsden Hartley’s paintings of Maine. On view at Pamela Salisbury are Kozloff’s maps and a group show of work inspired by books as well as Robin Hill’s rustic-industrial sculptures.
At LABspace, Julie and Ellen have put together another fine “Holiday” sampler exhibition featuring hundreds of small works by notable artists from the Hudson Valley, Brooklyn, and beyond. Front Room Gallery and Buster Levi too offer group shows of work that would be perfect for heirloom gift-giving.
In Chatham, at Joyce Goldstein, don’t miss “Horizon Line.” Curated by Susan Jennings and David Humphrey, this will be the last show at the gallery unless someone steps up to take over the lease.
Note that the Guide now includes selected listings for galleries in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Welcome to the Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide!
Latest post, link in profile / MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS Emilio Vedova: Venice’s Abstract Expressionist / Contributed by David Carrier / Emilio Vedova (1919–2006), who lived and worked in Venice, was once aptly dubbed the Jackson Pollock of the barricades. Employing that American painter’s gestural technique, Vedova made political art. “Rivoluzione Vedova” – “Revolution Vedova” – is an appreciative retrospective of his work on the third floor of the spacious M9 Museum of the 20th Century in Mestre, a very short train ride from Venice. It includes five of his small, quasi-figurative paintings from 1945; a number of his larger abstractions from the 1960s; Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ’64, a series of paintings on wood made in Berlin; photomontages from 1968; tondos from 1985; and an elaborate installation of his heavily pigmented panels. Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / What’s up in the Hudson Valley? At Jack Shainman The School in Kinderhook, take some time at the sprawling installation by Meleko Mokgosi, co-director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking at Yale. Employing a range of media dense with meaningful images and ideas, the show explores the theme of subjugation. Also in Kinderhook, stop by SEPTEMBER for “Of Waves,” a two-person abstraction exhibition featuring London-based Jane Bustin and Hudson Valley-based Anne Lindberg. The two painters investigate the things we can feel but can’t see or touch. Carrie Haddid has an elegant group landscape show called “Vanishing Point.” Also in a landscape mode but perhaps less somber is Mary Breneman’s bold landscapes at D’Arcy Simpson, which recall Marsden Hartley’s paintings of Maine. On view at Pamela Salisbury are Kozloff’s maps and a group show of work inspired by books as well as Robin Hill’s rustic-industrial sculptures.
At LABspace, Julie and Ellen have put together another fine “Holiday” sampler exhibition featuring hundreds of small works by notable artists from the Hudson Valley, Brooklyn, and beyond. Front Room Gallery and Buster Levi too offer group shows of work that would be perfect for heirloom gift-giving.
In Chatham, at Joyce Goldstein, don’t miss “Horizon Line.” Curated by Susan Jennings and David Humphrey, this will be the last show at the gallery unless someone steps up to take over the lease.
Take a look at the post as there is more worth checking out. Use the Two Coats of Paint handy interactive map to the Hudson Valley art region to help find all the galleries on the list and others. Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / Hannah Antalek’s crystal ball: Magical and disconcerting / Contributed by Heather Drayzen / “Superseed,” Hannah Antalek’s debut NYC solo exhibition at 5-50 gallery in Long Island City, draws on our species’ overall apathy about the environment. A surreal, dream-like sensibility informs a bio-luminescent vision of nature, cumulatively derived from dioramas she constructs from recyclable materials. She pulls us into a magical but also disconcerting world. Link in profile
Image: Hannah Antalek, Perpetual Aurora, 2023, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 inches
Latest post, link in profile / Nancy Davidson’s wandering carnival / Contributed by Fintan Boyle / A sense of serious satire has pervaded Nancy Davidson’s work for years, and it is on prominent display in her show “Braids Eggs and Legs: A Wandering,” installed in two large galleries at Catskill Art Space alongside Matt Nolen’s work. Davidson has long been a fan of morselized language and sundered bodies, which in theory would make her work fertile ground for the psychoanalytically inclined. Yet here she elides the sexual menace and violence that, say, Melanie Klein offers. Instead, she wanders, as her title announces. Link in profile
OPEN CALL! Apply today for NYC Crit Club`s Plum Lime Residency / Winter 2024 ❄️⏰ / Guest Juror: Paddy Johnson Founder of VVrkshop
The Plum Lime Residency will grant one artist a free 550 sq. ft. private studio space for 5 weeks (January 15 - February 17, 2024) this winter in Bushwick (Brooklyn)!
Latest post, link in profile / Interview: Holly Miller’s transatlantic sensibility / Contributed by Leslie Wayne / If you meet Holly Miller on the street, you will encounter a warm, exuberant, emotionally expressive, and funny person who immediately pulls you into her space. You would not expect her art to be highly controlled, minimal, and geometric. Yet she has built her career on paintings that are just that – slightly irregular geometric shapes, flatly painted and intersected by lines sewn with thread. But Miller is now at a crossroads and her work is suddenly exploding outward, making room for new materials, chance encounters, and unpredictable forms. Perhaps, as with many artists, COVID has had something to do with this shift. Life seems a little more precious these days, and taking new aesthetic chances is a small way of asserting courage in the face of the unknown. Link in profile
Latest post, link in profile / The evolution of Justine Hill / Contributed by Riad Miah / It is a pleasure to watch an artist evolve and see surprising changes, as in the case of Justine Hill with her current exhibition “Omphalos” at Dimin Gallery. Over the course of four solos, elements of her work have remained consistent. These include the cut-out shapes that jostle to fit together, and the color that complements (or contradicts) abutting forms. Hill’s earlier work has been likened to the masterful Elizabeth Murray’s. The comparison was apt enough insofar as she, like Murray, worked on irregularly shaped canvases, but it didn’t seem to go much deeper than that until now. Link in profile
Image: Justine Hill, Bend 2, 2023, acrylic, pastel, oil stick, and paper on canvas, 67 x 69 inches
Latest post, link in profile / Katherine Bradford: Heaven on Earth / Contributed by Rick Briggs / To one growing up Catholic, heaven and hell were in no way, shape, or form mere metaphors for possible destinations in the afterlife. They were very real places to spend all eternity, either heavenly salvation or eternal damnation. Forty years ago, Katherine Bradford proposed an exhibition to Chris Martin and me titled “3 Catholics.” While it never took place, the idea was to gather three lapsed Catholics who shared that particular cultural grounding and also similar painting values, and who were all now earnestly in pursuit of our new religion – Painting. This memory came wafting back to me the morning after viewing “Arms and the Sea,” Bradford’s solo show of remarkable new paintings at Canada. Link in profile
Image: Katherine Bradford, Swimmers Under Pink Sky, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68 inches
