Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Contributed by Riad Miah / �Just Hold On,� the title of Gary Petersen�s second show at McKenzie Fine Arts on the Lower East Side, fits the arresting energy of his work, his playful palette, and the rich provenance of his geometric abstractions. Perhaps he is referring to the moment a person […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler /�Calling Catherine Howe�s whirling, monochromic flower paintings �the pleasure garden� is archly ironic, like calling de Kooning�s early paintings �women.� Although her canvases�outwardly do describe floral forms, their deeper meaning lies in the large, threatening scale, the aggressively fluid use of materials, and the evident physical�energy […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For a while it looked as though William Powhida might be painting himself into an existential corner. His mission was to sensitize his audience to the hypocritical churn of the art market — to the reality that what made producing something putatively nobler and loftier than […]
Contributed by Martin Bromirski / Frankie Gardiner lives in an old house across from a barn at the curve of a narrow road. Her yard is almost overgrown, the forest is closing in. With the lights out inside her house, near the end of an August day, I visited to […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Brooklyn-based Matthew Miller, recognized as an extraordinary figurative painter for some time, recently held an open studio in anticipation of a three-person show in Copenhagen. Included among three paintings slated for display is an unusually complex one for him, magnificent in both its solemn, old-world dignity […]
Contributed by Liz Ainslie / For several years I have watched Elisa Lendvay�s sculptures emerge with a winning combination of grace and wonkiness from the cement floors and drywall corners of Bushwick spaces, and appear as jewel-like talismans atop the pedestals of Midtown galleries. �Rise,� Lendvay�s solo exhibition at Sargent�s Daughters […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Neue Galerie?s compellingly incisive exhibition, titled ?Eclipse of the Sun: Art of the Weimar Republic? and anchored by Georg Grosz?s 1926 painting Eclipse of the Sun, yields an ominously resonant tableau of a post-World War I Germany saturated with angst. Grosz?s busy, quizzical work depicts […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Recently, Natasha Wright and Benjamin Pritchard had concurrent solo exhibitions at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. Both painters are drawn to a raw style of power painting that conjures Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in the pre-drip years, when they were thinking about Jungian analysis, the […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Despite our deep dive several years ago into Provisional painting and the Casualist tendency, a battery of questions continues to confront painters in the studio: can a painting be meaningful if the process involves fun rather than struggle? Is hard-earned resolution required? Or can something painted quickly and easily […]
Images by Julie Torres, text by Christina Tenaglia / In addition to drawing and keeping sketchbooks, artists often take notes throughout the process of making their work. The notes published herein are from Christina Tenaglia, whose unabashedly human and thoroughly investigated work is on view at Thomas Parks Gallery through August 10.
