Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, March 24, 2023
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Singling out individual works for praise in an exhibition of the size and range of MoMAs Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is almost beside the point. Her first US retrospective in 40 years, it includes 300 of her approximately 1,200 extant works: pencil drawings, gouache
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Its quite a feat for a figurative painter to achieve both intimacy and remove simultaneously, but Jennifer Packer accomplishes just that in The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, the vibrant survey of her work at the Whitney.
Contributed by Anne Swartz / Since its origins in the 1970s, practitioners and advocators of the Pattern and Decoration movement have countered claims that decorative art lacked seriousness. In America at the time, critical arguments focused on the exhaustion of painting, positioning it as an outmoded visual form. Several artists resisted this affront. Instead, they embraced images for their pleasure, opposing the notion of immediacy often considered synonymous with other mediums such as photography.
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.
If theres one word that sums up Paul Czanne (1839-1906), the subject of this massive MoMA exhibition, its struggle.
Contributed by Anne MacLeod / I first encountered the installation Antoines Organ by Rashid Johnson in 2019 by accident, as it sat serenely inside the ornate and spacious entryway of the Gropius Bau in Berlin. At the tail-end of an exhausting work trip, I was taken aback by the compelling […]
By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently on view in the Whitney Museums first-floor lobby gallery (free of charge to the public). And rightly so. Toors pictures touch the heart, and his […]
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Now on view as part of the deCordova Museum�s �Visionary New England� exhibition, Josephine Halvorson�s lyrical yet meticulous oil paintings employ no masquerade of myth. Rather, they are documentations of nature that meld history, self, and place. Her intense practice centers on painting chosen […]
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The Museum of Modern Art�s �Fall Reveal� marks the second phase of the museum�s re-telling of the story of Modern Art (the first phase opened in October, 2019), and there are big changes. First, with its $450 million expansion adding 47,000 feet of exhibition space, […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Trump administration has tried to physically cordon off Mexico from the United States, and presumably would just as soon exclude the country from America�s cultural orbit as well. From that perspective, the Whitney�s judiciously conceived exhibition �Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art� is […]
Two Coats Obituaries