Contributed by Kay Whitney / There is a fundamental paradox at work in Elisa D’Arrigo’s ceramic objects — while they are unmistakably beautiful, they break every standard for what is considered “beautiful.” They are small, shambolic, eccentric objects lacking symmetry; they are not overtly colorful and don’t attempt to please. They are humble, not loudly announcing nor applauding their own appearance; understated and private, the viewer must come to them. Rather than exhibiting the mechanical surfaces of a wheel-thrown or machine-made object, her forms bear the imprint of her hands and in that way reveal the processes of their making.
Catalogue Essay
Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings
Contributed by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi / In the 1970s, Jack Whitten developed a unique painting language driven by process and concept and characterized by material experimentation, dense luminosities, and multidimensionality. This exhibition brings together forty works from Whitten’s land- mark Greek Alphabet series, realized in his downtown New York studio between 1975 and 1978. The paintings were on view at DIA Beacon through July 10, 2023.
Alyssa Fanning: Ravishing Devastations
Physical and psychological effects of natural and man-made disasters are the subject of Alyssa Fannings delicate draawings, on view at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Sue Havens: Encoding history
Sue Havens history her searching and sometimes painful life experiences and her adventurousness in the studio are distinctly encoded, like a unique double helix of molecular structure, in the complex work she has produced this past year.
Austin Lee�s muscular blankness
Something there badly not wrong �Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho Contributed by David Humphrey / The spinning rainbow symbol interrupts our screen time. Buffered and helpless, we pause with the device to wait, perhaps to sink back into our thoughts or to drift into another task. That rainbow, called by some […]
Catalogue essay: Elisabeth Condon’s flowers and the visionary impulse
Contributed by Jason Stopa / Some painting of the last decade presents itself as politically neutral, simply about aesthetic taste, and lacks any stakes. Others still are incredibly didactic, demanding the viewer agree with their sentiment as much as their surfaces. Somewhere in the nexus of this is a painting […]
Catalogue essay: Paul Pieroni on Peter Halley’s 1980s painting
The aim of this text, which was originally published as “Facts are Useless in Emergencies” in Peter Halley: Paintings of the 1980s The Catalogue Raisonne, is to provide an in-depth analysis of Peter Halley’s painting as it emerged during the 1980s. I engage Halley’s theoretical writing — which extends his […]
Catalogue Essay: Aubrey Levinthal at Nancy Margolis
Contributed by Samantha Mitchell / In his definition of heterotopia (of which utopia and dystopia are types)�Michel Foucault writes about the mirror as an agent of transformative realization of self in place � simultaneously illuminating and falsifying our own image: I see myself where I am not, in an unreal, […]
Korean monochrome: Suh Seung Won
Contributed by Raphael Rubinstein / Among the most welcome developments of the past few years in the U.S. art world has been the appearance, long delayed, of substantial numbers of works by two avant-garde groups of the 1960s and 1970s, the Tansaekhwa painters of Korea, often referred to as Korean […]
Catalogue essay: Raphael Rubinstein on Drew Shiflett
Raphael Rubinstein wrote the following essay, �Eccentric Modularity,� on the occasion of Drew Shiflett�s elegant solo show of new collage pieces, on view through June 30, at Lesley Heller Workspace in New York. —— I wonder when the great variety of process entered the field of art. When did certain artists […]