An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Contributed by David Carrier / Five smallish early Jo Baer paintings are on display in one white- walled gallery at DIA Beacon in her exhibition there since 2022. The show is both tantalizing and exasperating. In the 1970s, Baer became famous as a minimalist painter. Then she left New York, published a manifesto in 1983 proclaiming “I am no longer an abstract artist,” and changed her style completely.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / “A Painting is a Real Thing,” the Parrish Museum’s current exhibition of the work of the Abstract Expressionist painter James Brooks (1906–1992), is his first comprehensive retrospective in 35 years. On the rare occasions I’ve encountered Brooks’s paintings, I’ve paid them scant attention. Like many, I have walked on by, presumptively ranking him well below the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. With this survey of more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints, I find myself reconsidering Brooks’s status. With the 176-page catalog containing essays by adjunct curator Klaus Ottmann and artist-writer Michael Solomon, the show makes a case that Brooks’s art is more original and important – both within and beyond the context of the AbEx movement – than most of us thought.
Contributed by David Carrier / It’s difficult to imagine a more effective presentation of Clyfford Still’s work than “A Legacy for Buffalo,” now in the brand-new wing of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. In four very high, white-walled galleries, the 33 paintings – most of them made between 1937 and 1963 and bearing Still’s distinctly prosaic and thematically unenlightening titles – have room to breathe and provide a full picture of Still’s early development.
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.
Contributed by Jason Stopa / An international survey at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University explores how contemporary artists use abstraction to encode otherwise invisible realities: climate change, political strife, and inequalities of all stripes. Some are household names, others still emerging. Titled “So it appears,” the show is anything but timid. It boasts some 19 artists occupying three floors, each one grappling with the limits of abstraction and its history and pressing beyond the frame of the canvas. Western abstraction has tackled social and political issues before – there was deconstruction in the 1960s, Neo-Geo in the eighties, and most recently the palpable Trump-era uptick. “So it appears” looks to the Global South for perspective.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Vincent van Gogh drew from many sources in his short, intensely inventive career. “Van Gogh’s Cypresses,” now up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, highlights his encounter with the Mediterranean conifer. A symbol of mourning, it dramatically punctuates the Tuscan landscape, and appears in paintings by Leonardo, in Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead series (who probably it in Rome), and Salvador Dali, among others. Van Gogh noticed the “interesting, dark note” in the Provencal landscape, near the end of a peripatetic life.
Contributed by David Carrier / Joan Brown’s retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh includes some 40 paintings, most of them large, and a couple of sculptures. The high, white-walled galleries on the top floor of the museum afford her paintings ample room to breathe.
Contributed by Abshalom Jac Lahav / The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, has reopened after a stunning 70,000 square-foot renovation. The new building was carefully designed and constructed to blend into the surrounding New England landscape and weave together a vast tapestry of art and science. It is fitting that “Natural Order,” a retrospective of the brilliant naturalist painter Lois Dodd’s work featuring almost 80 paintings from the mid-1950s to 2021, is the revamped museum’s first major exhibition. Her personal landscapes and interiors embody a unique style that is both sentimental and painterly.
Contributed by David Carrier / The 35 works on display at the Hermitage Amsterdam, including a number of paintings by Rembrandt or his apprentices and some by his followers Carl Fabritius and Ferdinand Bol, afforded me the opportunity to re-assess my views about Dutch art.
Over 13 years ago, Two Coats of Paint noted Elizabeth Gourlay’s exhibition of abstract paintings in Chester, Connecticut. On the occasion of her outstanding solo exhibition of paintings and collages at the New Britain Museum of American Art, Two Coats took the opportunity to catch up with her.
Contributed by David Carrier / “Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America” at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art focuses on the pre-Clement Greenberg American art world – before Abstract Expressionism had triumphed, before the high-pressure commercial gallery system had been established, before American painters self-consciously sought to extend the traditions of European modernism, before they assumed the burden of building on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. Yet it’s important not to exaggerate that admitted hinge-point in art history. In the 1930s, prominent art dealers like Sidney Janis championed some of the outsider cadre as heartily as he would young Abstract Expressionists, and New York galleries hung their work as well as that of future American art stars they would later fete.
Contributed by David Carrier / The National Gallery’s retrospective celebrating the centenary of Lucian Freud’s birth is first exhibition of his work in a museum of historical art. Freud himself was very familiar with The National Gallery. As the catalogue says, he thought of it “as a doctor to whom, as an artist, one turned for help.” With more than 60 paintings on display, we get a full picture of his career.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Understanding the work of the mostly overlooked artist Benjamin Wigfall (1930–2017) requires looking at far more than the art. Over the course of his lifetime he made numerous paintings, assemblages, collages, and prints, a number of which are on display in the large, thoughtfully curated survey exhibition “Ben Wigfall & Communications Village” at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I went to visit Fran Shalom’s studio in Jersey City on the occasion of her first solo museum show, “Duck/Rabbit” at the Hunterdon in Clinton, New Jersey. Continuing a conversation we’d started at “Groping For the Elephant,” Shalom’s 2021 solo show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea., we discussed surface, shape, ambiguity, and the confidence painters develop over time. “Duck/Rabbit” was curated by Mary Birmingham and opens on October 2.
Contributed by Kari Adelaide / Dana Sherwood’s exhibition “Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness,” on view at the Florence Griswold Museum, embraces domesticity and wildness, method and chaos, human and animal, the ordinary and the magic. Captured in night-vision infrared, Sherwood’s work turns on her appreciation of nature and fantasy alike and her generosity towards the fauna we live with.
