An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 23, 2026
Contributed by Bill Arning / In the mid-1980s, great art experiences of every conceivable stripe seemed to bloom prodigiously and organically from a single club on Avenue A called the Pyramid. Out of this dark, sticky-floored dive came a motley congregation of artists, musicians, drag queens, filmmakers, and poets who launched shockingly original cultural provocations that still reverberate globally, even though relatively few people witnessed them at the time.
Contributed by Jonathan Agin / Formed by erosion over millions of years, Chaco Canyon was the site of the Ancestral Puebloan people’s sprawling urban center. Buildings erected there in the eleventh century were among the tallest in North America until the nineteenth. These remote, enigmatic ruins, marked on early Spanish maps, were rediscovered in the modern era by US Army surveyors after the Mexican-American War. Today they are part of the Navajo Nation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. When Anne Wehrley Björk was a child, her family used to take her camping there. As demonstrated in “Lost Canyon,” her new show of paintings at Margot Samel, she has never forgotten the landscape.
Contributed by Adam Simon / A photographer friend once asked me why painters are always talking about the space in a painting. He wanted to know what this term “space” meant. I talked about the different ways paint on a flat surface could be made to suggest depth, and how the challenge for modern painters was to create depth while also reaffirming the flatness of the support. I probably referred to the elusive concept of the “picture plane” and how simultaneously maintaining mutually exclusive ideas – flatness and depth – could produce a poetic or even a mystical dimension in visual art. Most abstract paintings present shallow space, keeping depth to a minimum. This type of painting is usually non-hierarchical; nothing feels more essential than anything else. The viewer’s eye tends to scan. If you want to both represent depth and reaffirm flatness, shallow space is going to be easier to handle than deep space.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Peter Plagens’ bracing new abstract paintings don’t so much as invite you in as dare you not to enter. Each canvas consists of three basic components: a painted frame of washy gray or brown; a pristinely rendered hard-edge shape, assertively opaque, centrally positioned, vertically symmetrical, and horizontally striated; and scattered, seemingly directional slashes. The second feature propels the paintings, but the other two steer them. The distinctly dilute vagueness of the frames might impart risk, the pesky shards impulse, and the vivid, intuitively color-coded ramps expansive fate – humble versions of Jacob’s Ladder, vouchsafing a future that need not be feared, at least distantly echoing one of Dave Hickey’s blithely peremptory and eminently arguable mantras: “Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.”
Contributed by Joe Fyfe / A large souvenir brochure accompanied Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” tour in the late 1980s. It included, among an assortment of photographs of him and reproductions of his sketches, a thousand-word essay titled “How To Speak Poetry” that has had a second life on the internet. In this singular artistic manifesto, Cohen admonishes singers that they are “among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside.” On the next page, he tells them to “think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report.” If an audience appreciates the event, “it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.” Su-Mei Tse’s current exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery seems to freshly embody Cohen’s abiding concern with presentation and how an artist must address an audience.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / A painter I once knew – a highly regarded abstractionist, modernist, and lover of Matisse as well as a popular professor – praised the work of a student during a critique. One of his colleagues, a postmodernist painter not so well regarded, said dismissively, “I don’t know, all I see are some colors on canvas.” The first painter replied hotly, “What the hell do you think painting is all about?” Another time, I invited a painter, now sadly sidelined, to join me at a survey of contemporary abstraction. There was a pregnant pause, “To see what exactly, Michael … shapes?” Many remain skeptical about the relevance, meaning, and remaining potential of manipulating shapes and colors. But Jane Haimes is still fruitfully exploring the possibilities. She understands that as long as there is painting, there will be shapes and colors, so we ought to make something of them.
Contributed by Nathan Storey / James Horner: Making of an American Dandy at Amos Eno Gallery looks back across forty years of the artist’s life and practice without tidying the record. The works in the retrospective are bruised and glamorous, horny and grieving, and above all, alive.
Contributed by Aaron Michael Skolnick / Ana Benaroya’s solo exhibition “Eternal Flame” at The FLAG Art Foundation is a joyously absurd exploration of the female body and masculinity. As a child of the ‘90’s making my way from room to room bouncing between fields of color and exotic scenarios, I can’t help but think about the burlesque quality of American Gladiators and the World Wrestling Federation’s images of women. But Benaroya is also serious about sexual politics.
Contributed by Rebecca Allan / Just off rue de Jarente in the Marais, Galerie Pavec – which late last year presented “L’Esprit Français,” the first […]
Contributed by Laurie Heller Marcus / Paint on sculpture can disrupt our spatial savvy, challenging habits of looking we bring to the interpretation of form. Lee Tribe plays with them in a variety of ways in his current show “Catching the Sun” at Victoria Munroe Fine Art. As a sculptor, he’s played the long game. Trained at a young age as a welder in the shipyards of his native England, Tribe later studied at St. Martin’s College of Art with Anthony Caro and William Tucker, a long-time friend and mentor. After moving to the United States, he immersed himself in painting, noting how marks move the viewer through the composition of an image.
Contributed by Kate Sherman / On a freezing night earlier this month, I visited the opening of “Respawn,” Will Kaplan’s first solo show at D.D.D.D. gallery. The gallery recently traded its tight space in a Chinatown walk-up for a large, sweeping basement with a nook near the entrance, which houses Kaplan’s show. Five sizable works built primarily of wood are cleated to the walls and face the center of the room, where a provisional pedestal supports a clearly handbound notebook. Across the face of each wooden form, imagery sourced from printed matter is layered into dense collages. Kaplan’s vintage aesthetic held me back from apprehending the profusion of images present as a facsimile of our contemporary mediascape.
Contributed by Marjorie Welish / Robert Storr’s canvases are designed to counter expectations and require us to discard habitual taste. Disequilibrium reigns in abstract compositions exploiting the inexhaustible potential of the basic unit of the square. To keep the viewer alert, he employs novel moves and tactics, inserting an eye-catching red block within otherwise black and white interlocking compositions. But Storr’s paintings, on view at Vito Schnabel through January 17, are not about color, or even about perception and finesse bestowed to a surface. Rather, color for him is a signal to attend to a structural remit for composition.
Contributed by David Carrier / For a long time, I have always thought of Richard Diebenkorn as a great painter. A couple of his paintings were in my local museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where I treasured seeing them. But he was, so I believed, someone whose development was straightforward, even a little boring. I arrived at Gagosian’s large upstairs gallery on Madison Avenue with low expectations of a thick array of Diebenkorns in that one room. Maybe it had been a mistake, inspired by misguided nostalgia, to take on this assignment. In the event, the exhibition was revelatory, holding me spellbound. This is one reason why I love being an art critic – the surprise.
Contributed by Peter Schroth / Anyone with an aversion to charm might want to sidestep Rob Lyon’s seductive show at Hales Gallery. Those seeking a diversion from the world’s traumas may find a refuge there. From Sussex, England, the artist finds his inspiration in the local landscape – a common point of reference for modern British painters. Their ghosts and others’ are clearly traceable here. Indications emerge of several additional painting traditions. Lyon borrows freely from his British forbears – note his use of rosy sand and faded blues in line with their penchant for muted palettes – but also from the Cubists and Giorgio Morandi.
Contributed by Bill Arning / Private Public Gallery has earned its reputation for mounting deeply considered exhibitions of painting that honor artists who have spent decades refining their own private grammars of mark and color. Entered through a small garden – an architectural prelude that feels almost ceremonial – the gallery offers a perfect threshold for work that rewards slow, attentive looking. “Here, Elsewhere,” Kylie Heidenheimer’s first solo exhibition there, is fully in that lineage.
