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 […]
Museum Exhibitions
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 […]
A new maximalism? Collecting, typologies, and objects in “The Keepers”
The New York Times Magazine recently ran a column about the tyranny (and ubiquity) of minimalism as a hipster aesthetic. Author Kyle Chayka explored the […]
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 […]
The gap between: “Unfinished” at the Met Breuer
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In recent years, artists have been interested in “slippage.” In painting, that often translates into an exploration of the space […]
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 […]
Objecthood: Joan Miro’s painted sculptures
Last week “Miro and the Object,” curated by William Jeffett, opened at the Fundaci Joan Miro in Barcelona. The role of the object has never […]
Ode to Robert Bordo
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 […]
Jack Whitten: Ready-nows
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Jack Whitten (b. 1939, Alabama) makes paintings in which paint application, embedded materials, and evocative titles embody narrative—the story of […]
Pop abstraction: Nicholas Krushenick at the Tang
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Last week at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, I got a chance to […]
Peter Halley: Hyperreal
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
