Author: Two Coats Staff

Studio Visit

Images: Jessica Weiss

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In Jessica Weiss‘s ruggedly handsome paintings, strange, puppet-like figures emerge and recede from floral wallpaper patterns that are vigorously screen-printed […]

Museum Exhibitions

Painting? Painting?

Contributed by Sharon Butler / At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curators Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan have organized “Painter Painter,” an exhibition comprising work by fifteen artists, some of whom are working with painting materials in ways that are often labeled “painting” but may be more firmly rooted in  Minimalism and Process Art than with the formidable history of painting and abstraction. Considering the work presented in this show as well as the work selected for the deCordova Museum’s “Paint Things,” perhaps we aren’t experiencing an expansion of painting as the curators have proposed, but rather a return to handmade sculptural objects…that sometimes have paint on them or are hung on the wall.

Museum Exhibitions

Medium unspecificity prevails

At the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, curators Dina Deitsch and Evan Garza have organized “PAINT THINGS: beyond the stretcher,” an exuberant exhibition that focuses on work merging painting, sculptural form, video, performance, and installation strategies. The curators selected artists who are exploring materiality, context and space–physical, social, political, or emotional. I wish Clement Greenberg, the art critic who championed color and
flatness in the 1940s, could see the show. I wonder why painters were so intrigued with Greenberg’s notion of medium specificity back in the day?

Catalogue Essays

Catalogue essay: COVER THE EARTH by Stephen Maine

Curated by artists Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, “POUR,” an exhibition that examines the use of poured paint in contemporary art practice, opens this week at the Schmidt Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, Florida. Condon, a painting professor at University of South Florida and Prusa, a painting prof at FAU, tapped Stephen Maine to write the essay, which references Pollock, Kaprow, Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, James Brooks and others.