Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, April 19, 2024
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Esteemed in Germany during the Weimar Republic but branded a “degenerate artist” by the anti-modern Adolf Hitler, the great expressionist painter Max Beckmann fled Nazi Germany to Amsterdam and continued to paint. Returning to Germany after the war may have struck him as craven or […]
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 […]
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, […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In recent years, artists have been interested in “slippage.” In painting, that often translates into an exploration of the space between abstraction and representation, or between two and three dimensions. “Unfinished,” the inaugural show at the Met Breuer, examines another important area — the gap […]
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 […]
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 […]
Robert Bordo’s easel-sized paintings are prominently featured in “Greater New York,” the big quinquennial exhibition at MoMA PS1. Set aside in their own room, hung on white walls and carefully lit, the paintings walk the lines between painting and drawing, and representation and abstraction. Bardo paints with the improvisational, wet-on-wet […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When I stopped by the Florence Griswold Museum during a snowstorm in mid-March to see Peter Halley‘s retrospective, the glowing neon color and interlocking geometric forms — what he has called cells, prisons (that is, rectangular sets of prison bars), and conduits — had transformed […]
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 […]
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.
