Author: Two Coats Staff

Group Shows

Immaterial Projects: Calamity and hope

Contributed by Will Kaplan / Curatorial collective Immaterial Projects calls its group show at The Active Space in Bushwick “The Beginning of the End.” It might seem a bit late for the beginning. We can trace the sense of perpetual crisis as far back as we like: Trump’s first term, Citizens United, the Reagan years, and farther still. But by keeping the show’s formal scope to semi-traditional paintings, Immaterial Projects captures elements of past and present alike that still smack us in the face. The show’s colors span cement and sepia, hanging along the gallery’s opposing corners to illustrate decay in both urban and natural landscapes.

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Conversation

Yura Adams: A freewheeling conversation with Daniel Giordano

Daniel Giordano: Yura, I want to play a game of me spitting out a question and you rattling off an answer. A real Martin Kippenberger special of a “first thought, best thought” type response to keep us on our toes… Okay, so here we go: What artists do you steal from most and what bag of tricks did you whip out to aid in the making of your installation at Olympia?

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Resident Artist

Meet Two Coats Resident Artist: Bryce Speed

Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Bryce Speed, a painter and professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his intriguing abstractions from 2023–24, Bryce embedded architectural structures but refrained from fully imparting the specificity required to identify a particular situation or place. Instead, he played with the position of shapes within the picture plane to create subtle relationships and illusions of space….

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Catalogue Essays

Daina Higgins: At Home with Discord

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Daina Higgins began her vocation as an artist in the 1990s as a quintessential outsider: she was not only a graffiti artist in her native Columbus but also one of the few young women then so engaged there. Her noirish attraction to the oblique angles and ominous shadows of a presumptively benighted urban landscape in the Rust Belt has never flagged. At the same time, her paintings and drawings have acquired the existential gravitas that comes, if an artist has the requisite talent and mind, with the travails of life, the burden of lineage, and the compulsion to reflect on them.

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Solo Shows

Rick Briggs’s compositional irreverence

Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s refreshing and a little humbling to walk into a gallery and be blitzed by art that’s cleverly derived from years of play, probing, and practice. Rick Briggs’s solo show at Satchel Projects shows us how open-ended and liberating painting can be.

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Solo Shows

Catherine Murphy’s intimate realism

Contributed by Peter Schroth / At Peter Freeman, Inc., esteemed realist Catherine Murphy resurfaces with a new selection of her novel perceptions of the quotidian. In Cathy and Harry, a new documentary about the life, work, and marriage of Murphy and her husband Harry Roseman, also an artist, Murphy says that one of her prime objectives is to express “universal objectivity.” Against some strands of painting tradition, she chooses subjects so mundane as to be otherwise unremarkable, indicating a gentle contrariness.

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Solo Shows

Judith Linhares: Good gaudy painting

Contributed by Jason Andrew / Judith Linhares has a fascination with bad taste, the oh-too beautiful, and the color yellow. In her third solo exhibition at PPOW, she doesn’t hold back packing the gallery with paintings that feature strange figurative archetypes, gaudy décor, and kitschy bits all in an embrace of the subversive potential of visual excess.

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Solo Shows

Medrie MacPhee: Upcycling

Contributed by Adam Simon / The five abstract paintings in Medrie MacPhee’s “The Repair,” at Tibor de Nagy, have just enough indications of figure/ground and observed reality to evoke landscape, interior space, aerial view, blueprint. What also connects these paintings to the physical world, as we perceive it, are minor shifts of line, contour, or color that activate the surface and keep the paintings from being flat. While the paintings are large, all but one measuring 64 x 84 inches, somehow the small gallery doesn’t feel crowded.

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Solo Shows

Merlin James and the thinking of painting

Contributed by Sharon Horvath / Prominent critics have written extensively about the paintings of Merlin James, and James himself is an erudite art writer. Still, I am compelled to explore how it is that his painterly magic works on my mind. As I walked through the two rooms of his current show “Hobby Horse” at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, the paintings struck a chord, bringing up half remembered lines of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, plucked out of context.

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Solo Shows

Gerri Rachins’ raptorial abstractions

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / While some art pulls you in gently, Gerri Rachins’ paintings, now on display at The Painting Center, grab you like a raptor. Though unequivocally abstract, their affect, as it were, is prehensile. They seem to guard the walls, flexing with taut line and pulsing color, at once opaque and fluid.

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Solo Shows

Ross Knight: Sculpting in the material world

Contributed by Millree Hughes / With precisely targeted color, texture, and feel, Ross Knight’s sculptures in his solo show “Continuous Squeeze” at Off Paradise get at what physical artifacts mean in terms of our fears, fantasies, and daily struggles. Color is critical in Knight’s work. He keeps the palette small and specific, the colors he chooses leaning towards youthful nostalgia: the baby-blue of 1960s cars in Coupled Prop, a buoy yellow with custard drips in another Coupled Prop, the creamy hue of a rawhide dog chew-toy in Device. The band in Adjusted resembles an old, spent balloon, once yellow-orange but turned raw sienna with time. Does anyone ever get over a popped balloon? It’s a toddler’s tragedy. The fleshy knots, like umbilical cord buttons, are rendered useless.

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Gallery Guides NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, March 2025

After several years during which galleries have focused relentlessly on narrative and figurative work, I feel a vibe shift in the air. Is it wishful thinking or is abstract painting roaring back? I recommend checking out RJ Messineo’s show at CANADA, James Miller at Nichelle Beauchene, Nicolas Bermeo at King’s Leap, and Franklin Evans, who has moved from site-specific wall installations onto canvas in his show at Miles McEnery. I’m looking forward to Moira Dryer’s solo show at Magenta Plains, too. Known for a witty strain of post-minimal abstraction in the 1990s, she was a hero to painters of my generation who were then living in the long shadow of video, photography, and installation work.

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Screens

Cinema 2024: A tight dozen

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For better or worse, directly or inferentially, movies reflect the zeitgeist. This year, they predominantly resonated dread or resignation, and even those focused on personal endeavor had a political tinge. With humanity’s and especially America’s scabrous underbelly fully exposed, both idealism and irony seem to be taking a break, leaving something in between that doesn’t quite amount to earnestness. It’s not the nineties or even the seventies, though the occasional and fleeting nostalgic nod to better days lightened things up. Here’s one (alphabetical) list of the year’s notable movies, with the usual acknowledgement of idiosyncrasy and incompleteness.

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Remembrance Studio Visit

Walter Robinson’s big question: What do they want?

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Walter Robinson played an important role in the New York art scene for over five decades, and on Sunday, February 9, he passed away at his New York home. A piece in Artnet reported that the cause was liver cancer. Walter loved artists and the art world, and he believed that anyone could have a piece of it. You want to be a writer? Go ahead and write. You want to have a gallery? Open one. You want to be a painter? Paint. He was a hub of that world and never seemed to lose interest in the wild schemes…

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Solo Shows

Aaron Michael Skolnick: How heartbreakingly silly we are

Contributed by Nancy Friedland / I don’t remember exactly when I first came across the work of Aaron Michael Skolnick, but I do remember the feeling. Confronted by landscapes so filled with love and loss, I wondered how a painting of light in a forest could express so much. When the gorgeous images from his most recent project – face mash-ups of Aaron and famous, sometimes funny, often tragic characters – started to pop up in my feed, I needed to know more. I searched to see what was out there about Aaron’s show “The Entertainer,” currently up at MARCH Gallery in the East Village, and found nothing to satisfy my curiosity. As I began to dig into the work myself, I quickly realized that it had tentacles that wrapped around every aspect of the artist’s life. There were the paintings, yes, beautifully wrought, deftly painted, of course, but there was also an installation, photography, and performance. The work was so layered and complex that I felt the need to reach out directly to Aaron to ask him what it was all about. Last week, I picked up the phone and tried to uncoil some of those tentacles and make sense of a complex, brave, and very funny new body of work.

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