Author: Two Coats Staff

Solo Shows

Kosuke Kawahara: A heady stew of inspirations

Contributed by Michael Brennan / For a few years now I’ve been following Kosuke Kawahara’s art, which I’ve mostly seen in underground spaces such as Brian Leo Projects, Super Dutchess (now closed), and Culture Lab LIC. These presentations were uniformly fine and intriguing but also truncated and segmented, as was Kawahara’s previous on-line exhibition with RAINRAIN, which has now mounted “Exotic Star” – the artist’s and the gallery’s first true solo exhibition, and the gallery’s inaugural show at its new location on the edge of Chinatown. About a dozen paintings, works on paper, and small sculptures populate this rectangular space, occupying about a half-dozen distinctly crafted stations. It’s a revelation.

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Nicole Wittenberg’s vacationland

Contributed by Katy Crowe / Upon entering Fernberger Gallery, a welcome transplant from New York, the faint smell of oil paint introduces Nicole Wittenberg’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” the gallery’s inaugural show in Los Angeles. The title references a Count Basie composition, and the work does have the freewheeling feel of jazz. 

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Studio Visit

Twofer: Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger

Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.

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Gallery shows

NYC Selected Gallery Guide: March 2024

Welcome to the March edition of the only painting-centric guide to art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We’ll be updating next week, so if you have shows opening in the middle or at the end of the month, and you want us to consider them for inclusion, shoot us a note at staff@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put “NYC Guide” in the subject line.

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Gallery shows

Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen: Two for the show

Contributed by Riad Miah / Artists often become domestic partners. It’s an iteration of human nature. For one person to be attracted to another who has a similar creative sensibility and lifestyle is normal and sensible. Well-known examples include Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. While coupledom can be exhilarating for both partners, it can also be tense, competitive, and destructive. Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen had never considered showing together until settling on their current show at Equity Gallery, aptly titled “Feedback Loop.” They appear to have struck a healthy balance between separation and synergy.

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Solo Shows

Simon Hantaï: Canonical at last?

Contributed by David Carrier / What comes after Abstract Expressionism? A couple of generations ago, American art writers were intent on addressing that question. The American color field art of Morris Louis, Kenneth Nolan and Jules Olitski was one plausible answer. Then, of course, came Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and much more. The French had a different answer. They were interested in the abstraction of Hungarian-born Simon Hantaï (1922–2008), who moved to France in 1948 and whose work seemed in line with the post-structuralist theory that had taken hold there. His inspirations were Marxism, Catholic tradition, Matisse, Picasso, and Jackson Pollock as seen in Paris exhibitions, and his bête noire was Surrealism. Given these rich and disparate interests and impulses, it goes almost without saying that Hantaï developed a highly distinctive aesthetic. Long famous in France, his paintings recently have been shown in several ambitious Manhattan galleries, notably Timothy Taylor.

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Solo Shows

Martin Barré’s endless paintings

Contributed by David Rhodes / Matthew Marks’s current exhibition of Martin Barré’s paintings coincides with New York exhibitions of two other French painters: Alix Le Méléder at Zürcher Gallery and Simon Hantaï at Timothy Taylor Gallery. Together these shows furnish a good moment to consider the range and achievement of French postwar abstraction.

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Solo Shows

Dana Frankfort: Braiding the senses

Contributed by Matt Phillips / Dana Frankfort’s exhibition “Life and Death” at Olympia presents eleven paintings that are by turns blunt and strikingly sensitive.These new works juxtapose the written word with gestural abstraction, the two languages simultaneously contradicting and supporting one another. Some paintings have legible text while in others the letters are all but gone, leaving the viewer to contemplate space where words have once been. The works are disparate, but each reaches toward a cohesive resolution.

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Group Shows

An instructive ouroboros at Miguel Abreu

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Images are everywhere. This simple (perhaps obvious) fact is driven home in various ways all the time. Most often in NPR bullet points indicating how many images the average person consumes daily. The number is often greeted with dull terror. Yet images are so prevalent that they disappear, coating the world in an invisible film. This dual quality of ubiquity and invisibility is what makes images such an attractive and important subject for artists to tackle. The current show at Miguel Abreu is kind of a who’s who of artists who study images and their rhythm. 

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Solo Shows

David Hornung’s whispered secrets

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / There should be a word for the glorious sensation you get when you realize the art in front of you is better than you’d expected, having initially seen it on a screen. You may scoff, “Isn’t everything better in person?,” but I beg to differ. These illuminated contraptions we carry around everywhere are remarkably good at turning life to 11. When I’m rewarded with this aforementioned word-I-don’t-yet-have, I chalk one up for being there.  So it was when I stepped into David Hornung’s “New Work,” the inaugural exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery on the LES.

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Out of Town Solo Shows

Altoon Sultan’s big little paintings

Contributed by Katy Crowe / The quiet revelation in Altoon Sultan’s current show at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles is that small can be big. The paintings are compact and jewel-like. They also embody detailed images of large farm implements and machinery, and resonate, in a calm but assertive way, the power wielded by these massive machines.

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Solo Shows

Bruce Tapola’s foiblefest

In Bruce Tapola’s “Bad Tooth” at Post Times Gallery, ridicule and pathos are mediated by comic protagonists alone, in pairs, or in meager groups. Through two rows of small paintings, viewer identification and improvisational participation is compelled. In The Needle, the Haystack, two people behold an underwhelming painting centered within the conservatively hued, well-organized composition. Its unhinged gray textures look adventurous next to two blank surfaces, but austere against the warm ochre wall. The man is quietly attentive, possibly eager. The woman’s posture is stiffer, and her eyes look tired, but she’s not without earnestness. Either could be nervous or relaxed, trying to explain a new path of exploration, searching for meaning as the title implies. They could be student and teacher or professors discussing a student, friends having a routine studio visit, or strangers meeting at a residency. The two anchor the artwork and our view like stone lions guarding the entrance to a significant portal. Deadpan humor pokes fun at painting’s pretensions.

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Solo Shows

Nora Griffin’s beating heart

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / I first encountered Nora Griffin’s paintings on a blisteringly hot Saturday in the summer of 2022. David Fierman had just opened his rakish subway-tiled space on Pike Square, and it was unfinished as well as uncooled (though not, of course, uncool). The paintings in “Liquid Days” harmonized all the moody vibes vectoring into and radiating out of that vortex of LES attitude and history, rendering a sweaty refuge a sublime interlude. Her compositions were frenetic, with marks, cognizable images, and found objects wafting like crowd-wise insects all about the canvas, sometimes spilling over its edges….

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Solo Shows

Cathy Lebowitz: Restoring the Landscape

Contributed by Michael Brennan / In Cathy Lebowitz’s “Dark Skies, Rocks, her second solo exhibition at Skoto Gallery, about two dozen themed works on paper wrap around the walls of the cinderblock space. Many are washy gouache paintings, others are dash-marked drawings. Her paintings are painterly and her drawings graphic, exemplifying soundly medium-specific discipline. The works are refreshingly small, about the size of a writing tablet or an iPad, inviting closer inspection. I felt an unusually direct connection to the artist through what can be described as microcosmic meta landscapes, extending from her hand through her studio, as if directly sourced in real life

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