Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Contributed by Katy Crowe / The quiet revelation in Altoon Sultan’s current show at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles is that small can be big. The paintings are compact and jewel-like. They also embody detailed images of large farm implements and machinery, and resonate, in a calm but assertive way, the power wielded by these massive machines.
In Bruce Tapola’s “Bad Tooth” at Post Times Gallery, ridicule and pathos are mediated by comic protagonists alone, in pairs, or in meager groups. Through two rows of small paintings, viewer identification and improvisational participation is compelled. In The Needle, the Haystack, two people behold an underwhelming painting centered within the conservatively hued, well-organized composition. Its unhinged gray textures look adventurous next to two blank surfaces, but austere against the warm ochre wall. The man is quietly attentive, possibly eager. The woman’s posture is stiffer, and her eyes look tired, but she’s not without earnestness. Either could be nervous or relaxed, trying to explain a new path of exploration, searching for meaning as the title implies. They could be student and teacher or professors discussing a student, friends having a routine studio visit, or strangers meeting at a residency. The two anchor the artwork and our view like stone lions guarding the entrance to a significant portal. Deadpan humor pokes fun at painting’s pretensions.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / I first encountered Nora Griffin’s paintings on a blisteringly hot Saturday in the summer of 2022. David Fierman had just opened his rakish subway-tiled space on Pike Square, and it was unfinished as well as uncooled (though not, of course, uncool). The paintings in “Liquid Days” harmonized all the moody vibes vectoring into and radiating out of that vortex of LES attitude and history, rendering a sweaty refuge a sublime interlude. Her compositions were frenetic, with marks, cognizable images, and found objects wafting like crowd-wise insects all about the canvas, sometimes spilling over its edges….
Contributed by Michael Brennan / In Cathy Lebowitz’s “Dark Skies, Rocks, her second solo exhibition at Skoto Gallery, about two dozen themed works on paper wrap around the walls of the cinderblock space. Many are washy gouache paintings, others are dash-marked drawings. Her paintings are painterly and her drawings graphic, exemplifying soundly medium-specific discipline. The works are refreshingly small, about the size of a writing tablet or an iPad, inviting closer inspection. I felt an unusually direct connection to the artist through what can be described as microcosmic meta landscapes, extending from her hand through her studio, as if directly sourced in real life
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Freight + Volume’s vaulted Tribeca showroom is the perfect amalgam of its previous spaces in Chelsea and the Lower East Side: a charming and spacious boutique, ideally suited to paintings. Jared Deery’s tightly curated solo show “A Liminal Light”, includes large, portrait-oriented canvases featuring magic-marker-inspired motifs of drips, loops, blobs, and streaks that conjure still-life flowers and their imagined domains. In entering the gallery, they appear as natural and seamless as a screensaver at an internet cafe waiting for a patron to connect to Netscape. They are simultaneously retro and futuristic, borrowing from 1990s cyberpunk and catapulting its very obsolescence into a commentary on physical gallery space.
Contributed by Adam Simon / Carey Young’s exhibition “Appearance” at Paula Cooper is the latest installment of her more than 20-year artistic examination of the law as an institution. She is a leading progenitor of a growing cohort of artists who use research and analysis of institutions and systems in their work. In a video on the gallery website, Young states, “Law is too important to be left to lawyers… There are many ways to talk about it that haven’t been addressed.” Other reviews have focused on the information transmitted through the photos and video in the show. There remains the fundamental question of how, or if, an art exhibition can talk about a subject as prosaic as law in a constructively different way than a written or spoken medium. Does the language of visual art engage thought differently?
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Elizabeth Hazan’s exhilarating oil paintings, on view at Hesse Flatow gallery in Chelsea, marry old-school color field abstraction and loopy, gestural shorthand. Her medium-sized and large-scale canvasses fluctuate between recognizable landscape formations and patchworks of chromatic passages. In a style that is seriously playful, elemental motifs like trees and lakes are rendered as simple squiggles and glyphs straddling blocks of heightened color combinations. The paintings feel worked but never labored, and unleash the uniquely expressive power of color, line, and scale.
Contributed by Adam Simon / One could be forgiven for mistaking the paintings of David Rhodes at High Noon Gallery for samples of high-end décor, with black fabric punctuated by parallel diagonal stripes stretched over variously sized frames. Whether or not Rhodes anticipates that his work might elicit this response, for me it provided a hurdle, a momentary deflection, suspending my usual mode of engaging with art. I’m glad I had this moment of puzzlement, wondering what in fact I was looking at, before the significance of Rhodes’ achievement sank in.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / The contemplative works of Ukrainian American artist Sonia Gechtoff (born in Philadelphia 1926, died in NYC 2018), now on view at Bortolami and Andrew Kreps Gallery, range from the 1960s to early 2000s, but for me they evoke the frontality of Russian iconography, the dynamism of Italian Futurism, and the fractal abstractions of Sonia Delaunay. Gechtoff was fond of muted primary colors and variations of white and black, and her palette is deliberate and often subdued. Delicate graphite hatch marks spill across painted areas, suggesting movement and depth while presenting isolated instances from curious vantage points.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In Haskell Wexler’s iconic 1969 counterculture film Medium Cool, John Cassellis, a cold-eyed TV photojournalist, has internalized the notion of television as a “cool” medium in the McLuhan-esque sense of requiring viewers to search for context in order to understand what they are seeing. When covering the shockingly violent 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, though, he finds it increasingly hard to stay objectively aloof. If Cassellis succumbs to passion, Andy Meerow finds a more nuanced solution in the realm of painting – also a relatively cool medium – manifested in his gratifyingly quizzical work in “Slanted Andy” at Derosia. Meerow doesn’t either opt out or surrender; he just takes a sidelong view.
Contributed by Katy Crowe / “Significant Properties,” the title of Mary Jones’s current exhibition at as-is.la and her first in Los Angeles in some years, aptly suggests real estate worth seeing. Los Angeles is rich in such properties, and the cinematic allusions in her paintings are also broadly resonant of Tinsel Town, where Jones lived, worked, and showed before she moved to New York.
Contributed by Chunbum Park / In the seventeenth century, the English justified their North American conquests with the Roman concept of res nullius, whereby all people owned unoccupied land until it was put to some worldly use. The English philosopher John Locke suggested that the Europeans could disregard all indigenous forms of government and deny indigenous peoples sovereignty because Europeans, unlike the indigenous, valued and worked the land. G. Peter Jemison, a member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, makes paintings and drawings that encapsulate indigenous beliefs about the land, many now on display in his show “On the Right Path” at 47 Canal, quietly but firmly countering the colonialist narrative.
Contributed by Abshalom Jac Lahav / “ComeClose,” Joan Snyder’s current exhibition at Canada, testifies to her enduring brilliance and evolving artistic language. Now 83, Snyder has been a trailblazer since the 1970s. With her “stroke paintings,” she disrupted the Minimalism that was then fashionable, left cold by its austerity and masculinity. Her rebellion made Snyder a feminist shaper of contemporary abstract art. The distinctive juxtaposition of vivid colors and earthy backdrops in her work reflects a lifelong determination to explore and push its boundaries. The exhibition’s title is an invitation to examine not just the art but also why we make it.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Magenta Plains is located on the Bowery, just as it breaks left onto Canal Street, in Chinatown. Upon entering, viewers are immediately greeted by a washy terre verte Jane Swavely painting, OID #3 Green, hanging above the desk. It sets an organic tone and is indicative of the half-dozen paintings to follow, hanging in the first-floor main gallery. Swavely’s seven canvases are all vertical, and are mostly diptychs, internalized or externalized. They are loosely painted with a 2- to 2 ½-inch flat brush, heavy on the solvent, with some wiping away by hand. Much color mixing happens directly on the surface. Swavely favors flared, phosphorescent hues. She cleverly manipulates paint with rags to create the illusion of light emitting from the ground. Her work glows, appearing backlit.
Contributed by Riad Miah / John O’Connor’s tools are basic and everyday, materials that one might think a child would use for their initial foray into art making. For his works on paper, many now on display in his solo exhibition “Man Bites Dog Bites Man” by way of Pierogi and L’SPACE, he uses colored pencils and graphite. But behind the simple tools is a discerning mind.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / While nostalgia and the yearning it precipitates may be gripping the art world, Cordy Ryman’s gently dazzling painting installations, on view at Freight + Volume, are unapologetically about the here and now – that is, what’s happening in one place today. Titled “Monkey Mind Symphony,” the show captures the distractions we encounter day by day, minute by minute. What could be more apt for our time than a visual language comprising small objects? Logically, they are the physical manifestations of tweets or threads, crafted easily, sometimes beguilingly unfinished in the traditional sense of the word, and arranged so as to radiate Ryman’s idiosyncratic energy.
Contributed by David Carrier / Born in Japan, Maki Na Kamura was trained in Germany, where she now lives and works. In that light, it’s not too surprising that she describes her work as “Caspar David Friedrich plus Hokusai minus Romanticism minus Japonisme.” Identifying herself as both a traditional painter and a contemporary artist, she notes that she might, on the same canvas, use both tempera and oil paint– two materials traditionally used separately. Her paintings and charcoal-on-paper drawings are poised between figuration and abstraction. The paintings are often centered on figures, but it’s not usually clear what’s happening in the work on view at Michael Werner. It may be hard to tell just what we are looking at, but it is obvious that her central concern is visual pleasure.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / As a young art student, I revered Frank Auerbach. His practice was a battle with inner demons, one of splayed brushstroke and open flesh that plunged deep into his psyche. The stories of him laboring countless hours on the same small portrait, painting and repainting, scraping it all off at day’s end – were they not the perfect embodiment of my own tortured soul? Were we not linked by artistic fury, the desire to express something frustratingly beyond our reach?
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Israeli-American artist Eyal Danieli passed away earlier this year. I met him a few times, but I didn’t know him. I was impressed by the force of his personality, or more specifically of his presence. It was not that he was intimidating. In fact, he struck me as a tender soul – a gentleman – but also a man weighted with a distinct and uncommon gravity. His painting, in its blunt sensitivity, is similar. Sadly, Danieli’s first exhibition with 57W57 Arts, solemnly called “Preoccupied,” is effectively a memorial show. But nothing can diminish the innate power of his small pieces.
Contributed by Peter Malone / The airplane-hangar dimensions of the top-tier commercial art gallery can be justified by the flexibility they offer both dealer and artist. In 2017, I watched David Zwirner adapt his Chelsea location on 19th Street to accommodate Alice Neel’s modestly sized portraits, then open it up to create the parking lot rug sale vibe that suited Josh Smith’s 2019 “Emo Jungle” bazaar. Those two events occupied my thoughts as I walked through the grandiose layout of Dana Schutz’s recent “Jupiter’s Lottery” exhibition.
