Contributed by Sharon Butler / �Songs for Sabotage,� the 2018 iteration of the New Museum Triennial, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Francesca Altamura of the New Museum, and Alex Gartenfeld of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, features elegantly installed, dimly-lit work by an international group of artists. Many of them have interdisciplinary practices […]
Museum Exhibitions
Marsden Hartley’s influences and ambition
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In the New York art community of the early 1900s, Marsden Hartley (born Lewiston, Maine 1877; died 1943 Ellsworth, Maine) found success elusive, and discovered, as almost all artists do, that developing a unique voice was a challenging proposition. He worked in New York, spent several […]
Agnes Martin: A resolutely solitary endeavor
Running late, I arrived at the press preview for the Agnes Martin retrospective long after all of the other critics and journalists had left. My inefficiency turned out to be a bonus. I had the place to myself, and walking alone up the Guggenheim spiral and following the unwinding of […]
Eric Aho shadows his father at the New Britain Museum
The energetic paint handling in Eric Aho�s work is like a shot of adrenaline for contemporary painters. In a solo exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art, Aho presents a selection of paintings (many of which were shown at DC Moore last year) that fuse portraiture and landscape, […]
Burri: On fire at the Guggenheim
Contributed by Sharon Butler / A naively enthusiastic member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party as a young doctor, Alberto Burri (1915?1995) served as a medic in World War II, ending up in a POW camp in Texas, where he began drawing and painting. He returned to Italy after the war […]
Objecthood: Joan Mir�’s painted sculptures
Last week “Mir� and the Object,” curated by William Jeffett, opened at the Fundaci� Joan Mir� in Barcelona. The role of the object has never been fully considered in Mir�’s work, and in light of the success of the Picasso sculpture show at MoMA, I thought readers might like to […]
The strategic now
In her statement for “The Forever Now,” the contemporary painting show on view at MOMA through April 5, 2015, curator Laura Hoptman makes a case that the Internet enables painters to sample styles from art history, creating an �ahistorical free-for-all� in which artists are �reanimating historical styles or recreating a […]
These threads are queer
Guest Contributor Clarity Haynes / The wall text at the portal to the exhibition “Queer Threads,” currently at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in Manhattan, bluntly states, �Is this work �gay?� You bet.� The show, with its confluence of queer and feminist sensibilities, is the perfect subversive, fuzzy, neon, rainbow, glittery storm. Transgression has never felt so friendly.
2014 Whitney Biennial: Curators’ statements, painting links
I’m looking forward to the opening of the Whitney Biennial this week because the selection includes a surprising number of painters, including a special nod from Michelle Grabner toward contemporary abstract painting by women. Perhaps reflecting the wide range of approaches artists engage today, the Whitney rejected a […]
Art History lesson: The Pre-Raphaelites, courtesy of Roberta Smith
“Pre-Raphaelite art is a volatile, highly complicated mixture of questionable intentions, literary erudition, ironclad nostalgia, meticulous realism, lavish costumes and a prescient technicolor palette. The brotherhood was formed in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, three disgruntled students at the Royal Academy of Art. […]