Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Monday, September 21, 2026
Contributed by James J.A. Mercer / There is an undeniable lushness to the paintings and textiles in Annette Hurs solo show Watching from the Other Side at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea. Elegant shapes shine through dappled light and leaves. Oils blur, drip, or dive across the surface at wild angles. But discolorations and deformations suggest that something is unresolved, something is in process.
Restricted to her studio during lockdown and cut off from large spaces in which to create site-specific work, Lisa Hoke felt the need to fashion pieces that were more portable and more presumptively permanent. What resulted is a scintillating revelation.
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Ann Schaumburger is a disciplined and systematic painter. She uses basic geometric motifs (triangle, rectangle, and square) to develop permutations of a core set of four brilliant colors that elaborate the intuitive resonance of a single structure: the gabled roof house. Works recently on view at A.I.R. Gallery draw on miners stone houses in Cornwall, England, and prefabricated metal sheds in Amherst, Virginia. The idea of a home, however schematic, evokes real-world associations, establishing a rich and subtle balance between form and content.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Lockdown called for the safety and comfort of an inner sanctum, but that of course produced the urge for unmediated exposure to nature. In curating Nice to See You Again, now up at Underdonk in Bushwick, Leonora Loeb and Keisha Prioleau-Martin set about finding art that captured that virtuous tension. They have succeeded, presenting varied but thematically harmonious work by ten artists, each of them in some way conveying the hibernation and re-emergence implied in the exhibitions amiable but also multivalent title.
Stephen Westfall has engaged with geometric abstraction in singularly rich and sophisticated ways for more than thirty years, never complacent but always considered. Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with him at Alexandres new Lower East Side space, where his work is on view through December 22.
Contributed by Leslie Wayne / Visual artists who also write criticism and reviews are not uncommon. Rarer are curators or museum directors who are also […]
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Devra Foxs thirteen graphite drawings on view at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea, two blue and the rest gray, depict structures organic in presentation but with an eerie resemblance to manmade objects such as furniture.
Contributed by Dion Kliner / Situated in Vancouvers original Chinatown, the Sun Wah Center has been an artistic hub housing a diverse cross section of the cultural community since 2016. In the Centers windowless basement, the Canton-sardine Gallery is isolated from street noise and has no natural light. For Kristin Mans, A-MARE to love-to sea, the gallery had been submerged in a deep violet-blue light and the sound of water that spilled into the hallway….
Welcome to the Two Coats of Paint painting-centric guide to gallery exhibitions in New York City. This month look for Jim Condron and Ilsa Murdock at Platform Project Space in DUMBO, and William Eckhardt Kohler’s solo at The Catskills in Tribeca (curated by Kyle Staver and Janice Nowinski)….
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Its quite a feat for a figurative painter to achieve both intimacy and remove simultaneously, but Jennifer Packer accomplishes just that in The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, the vibrant survey of her work at the Whitney.
Contributed by Anne Swartz / Since its origins in the 1970s, practitioners and advocators of the Pattern and Decoration movement have countered claims that decorative art lacked seriousness. In America at the time, critical arguments focused on the exhaustion of painting, positioning it as an outmoded visual form. Several artists resisted this affront. Instead, they embraced images for their pleasure, opposing the notion of immediacy often considered synonymous with other mediums such as photography.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Three days had passed since Muriel Redpathwho had hated her given name since birth and instead liked to be called Murehad seen Luke. Now here she sat, reading the news of his death on Twitter.
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Alan Prazniak’s small paintings, on view at Geary Contemporary in NYC and Millerton, align with one another, offering a kaleidoscopic account of open meadows and grasslands, perhaps informed by early memories.
A twelve-inch canvas Lisa Yuskavage included in her exhibition at David Zwirner upstages the entire show and much of the work the artist has exhibited to date.
Contributed by Dana Tyrrell / From 1965 to 1967, Elizabeth Murray a towering presence in contemporary painting who died in 2007 lived and worked in Buffalo, New York. Having moved from San Francisco to teach at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen College), she used her time in Buffalo to build up to living and working in New York City. Elizabeth Murray: Back In Town, Anderson Gallery at the University at Buffalo, demonstrated that this interlude was formative to the canonically understood Elizabeth Murray.
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / On the occasion of her first exhibition, beautifully installed at Thomas Erben Gallery, Janice Nowinski and I talked about how time presents itself in every aspect of her paintings – from references to art and personal histories, to the very material qualities of the work.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When I saw Douglas Melinis new work at Miles McEnery (on view until October 16), I was surprised how much it had changed since I saw his pattern paintings In “YOU HAVE TO PEER INTO THE SKY TO SEE THE STARS,” a 2016 solo show at 11R. I reached out via email to ask him about the bold transition.
UPDATED OCT 23 / Welcome to the Two Coats of Paint painting-centric guide to gallery exhibitions in New York City.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Painting is persistently and emphatically alive and well. Indeed, the notion that it is dead — or, more kindly, moribund — is so vapid and hidebound that merely saying that the notion is a cliche is itself a cliche. Yet in putting the lie to it one more time, the Bushwick gallery Transmitter’s succinctly penetrating group show “Material Mutations, part one: The Canvas” brings fresh insights in what might otherwise be an eye-rollingly redundant conversation.
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / In �Mettle,� Stacy Lynn Waddell�s expansive show at Candice Madey, the artist embraces different cultures throughout the world: Malian life in the 1960s; nineteenth-century American painting reflecting burgeoning capitalism; and seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting.
