An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, March 27, 2026
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / As the title “Blue Italian Skies Above” suggests, walking into the exhibition of Edith Schloss’s paintings now at Alexandre Gallery produces a kind of pastoral contentment. But don’t be fooled into thinking she was a shallow, acquiescent Pollyanna. Lurking in that casual lightness is a distinct quality of mortality and limitation.
Contributed by Adam Simon / In the neighborhood of abstract painting, Maureen McQuillan’s backyard – reflected by works on view at McKenzie Fine Art until May 15 – features process-based or system-based painting. Loosely defined, this is painting for which the process of its making is its primary subject and the finished painting is understood as evidence of that process.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / For her solo show, currently on view at March Gallery in the East Village, Ellen Siebers has created small paintings in oil on beveled birch panel that are poetic in their open-endedness and straightforward in their embrace of beauty.
Contributed by Adam Simon / One of Russell Maltz’s singular achievements is to demonstrate how easily utilitarian objects and materials can be transported, Cinderella-like, into the alchemical realm of fine art. This is partly a property of the materials themselves: the symmetry, weightiness, and economy of products meant for construction. “Russell Maltz: Painted/Stacked/Site” on view at Minus Space in Dumbo, through July 30, with an additional nearby storefront installation and a slide show depicting found sites of construction material.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Not many good contemporary painters fully embrace sports. The subject is burdened by daunting precedent (George Bellows) and mild cliché (Leroy Neiman). But this century, as social media have enabled athletes to reveal and fans to probe the people behind and beyond the moves, sports have acquired greater social and political resonance, sending a stronger demand signal to artists.
Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Claire Seidl’s contemplative works are closely aligned with the Abstract Expressionist/Existentialist ideal whereby the painter must be eminently present in order to access and transmit the sincerity of experience. Her paintings are not history bound, however, but rooted in the perennial quest for a very personal gesture unbounded.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Whatever strategies an artist employs to express their art intellectual, psychological, or mythological it must be first and foremost visually striking. In his first solo exhibition in New York, painter Zachary Keeting clears a high bar with a stunning set of ten paintings, on view at Underdonk through March 27.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Like a strobe light gifted with consciousness, Danica Lundy lets whatever she sees point a way through a painting. The six works in �Three Hole Punch� at Magenta Plains are informed by memories of soccer practice, parties, school, and more � themes that function mainly as armatures for corporeal drama and mesmerizing painting detail.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Howard Smith’s understated paintings, on view at Jane Lombard Gallery, are created through a meticulous process of accumulation. Call the technique abstract pointillism. The surfaces are covered with small dots, dashes and brushstrokes, building loosely woven fields of color that sometimes form recognizable geometric shapes. The pieces in this show vary in size from one-inch to eight-feet wide, but the size of the marks remains the same. In most, the color at first glance appears monochromatic, but subtle variations within unified fields create illusions of light and shallow space. In his most recent paintings, the smallest flecks of color are innovatively contrasted with larger dots of different colors. Smith has spent years working in this way. It must be intensely hermetic and time-consuming, but it seems to have been rewarding.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The poet and artist Anne Ryan (1889�1954) accomplished the rare feat of making precious art � art that�s small, perfectly executed, and pretty � that is not the least bit treacly or sentimental. Drawn to both abstraction and surrealism, Ryan was a quiet player in the avant-garde visual art circles of the 1940s, attracting less attention than women artists like Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan. Today she�s best known for her small collages, which she began after having a eureka moment at a Kurt Schwitters collage exhibition at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York in 1948.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / What conceptual painter hasn�t looked at an Ikea how-to diagram and at least fleetingly thought it would make a fine subject for a painting? David Diao has gone farther, deconstructing a Gerrit Rietveld chair and using the shapes and colors as the subjects for a new series of paintings, on view at Postmasters through March 12.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Mark Ryan Chariker?s paintings have a romantic, brooding quality that sometimes leans toward the Gothic. In All the Time in the World, his second solo show at 1969 Gallery in Tribeca, he paints youthful figures residing in lush woodlands or dream-like interiors who behave somewhat like fl?neurs, passively inhabiting time and space. These medium scale works in oil on linen and canvas are suffused with a glowing golden aura, and are defined by scenes that wistfully overlay the present onto the past.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When the Minimalists were casting paintings as nothing more than value-free objects in the world and the Pop Artists were knocking them off their elitist pedestal, Vincent Smith (1929-2003) was stalwartly maintaining his belief in the form as a conveyor of social reality and, beyond that, an instrument of political assertion. With great substantive range and technical facility, he invested his throat-grabbingly expressionistic paintings of the urban vistas and signature characters of Harlem and Brooklyn — sixteen now on display at Alexandre Gallery on the Lower East Side — with the brimming emotion of the African American nation. He made the work in this exhibition between 1954 and 1972, so the varied subject-matter is perhaps expected. More remarkable is the potent through-line of his vision.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / People love to categorize stuff, however silly it sometimes seems. Despite the best efforts of post-modernist artists to remove separations among media, they have proven surprisingly resilient. If you subvert categories, new ones tend to take their place. Jobi Bicos, whose work is currently on display at Lubov on the Lower East Side, is a savvy and interesting artist not because they�re trying to destroy them outright, but because they�re straddling several at once.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / �Library of a Dream,� Robert Janitz�s elegantly installed exhibition, on view at Canada through January 21, is a knockout. Janitz spent years in intense meditation communities, making paintings that seemed primarily about the physical experience of making the object, reflecting palpable focus and presence. Now he appears compelled to turn his attention gingerly outward and explore a somewhat more playful approach.
Amelie Mancini: Longing and wonder
St. Francis at the Frick
Tracy Burtz and Claire McConaughy: Vulnerability and resilience at The Painting Center
Kathy Butterly’s small-scale magnitude
Ezra Johnson and Matt Bollinger: Disrupting convention
Six artists meshing at Field Projects
“Sonorous” in Hackney: Stairway to heaven?
Doomscrolling 3-D + IRL: The 2026 Whitney Biennial
2025’s intrepid cinema
Sally Gall: What am I looking at?
Mira Schor: Uncensored
Two Coats Resident Artist: Nichole van Beek, March 16–20
