Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Devra Foxs thirteen graphite drawings on view at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea, two blue and the rest gray, depict structures organic in presentation but with an eerie resemblance to manmade objects such as furniture.
Solo Shows
Jennifer Packer’s tender distance
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Its quite a feat for a figurative painter to achieve both intimacy and remove simultaneously, but Jennifer Packer accomplishes just that in The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, the vibrant survey of her work at the Whitney.
Alan Prazniak’s kaleidoscopic view
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Alan Prazniak’s small paintings, on view at Geary Contemporary in NYC and Millerton, align with one another, offering a kaleidoscopic account of open meadows and grasslands, perhaps informed by early memories.
Thoughts on that small Yuskavage painting
A twelve-inch canvas Lisa Yuskavage included in her exhibition at David Zwirner upstages the entire show and much of the work the artist has exhibited to date.
Elizabeth Murray in Buffalo and for the ages
Contributed by Dana Tyrrell / From 1965 to 1967, Elizabeth Murray a towering presence in contemporary painting who died in 2007 lived and worked in Buffalo, New York. Having moved from San Francisco to teach at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen College), she used her time in Buffalo to build up to living and working in New York City. Elizabeth Murray: Back In Town, Anderson Gallery at the University at Buffalo, demonstrated that this interlude was formative to the canonically understood Elizabeth Murray.
Bad Boyfriends and Pink Bathers : A conversation with Janice Nowinski
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / On the occasion of her first exhibition, beautifully installed at Thomas Erben Gallery, Janice Nowinski and I talked about how time presents itself in every aspect of her paintings – from references to art and personal histories, to the very material qualities of the work.
Stacy Lynn Waddell: Moving backwards to jump ahead
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / In �Mettle,� Stacy Lynn Waddell�s expansive show at Candice Madey, the artist embraces different cultures throughout the world: Malian life in the 1960s; nineteenth-century American painting reflecting burgeoning capitalism; and seventeenth-century Dutch flower painting.
Nathaniel Robinson’s train of thought
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When Nathaniel Robinson takes the train from Brewster, New York, down to the city, he snaps pictures along the way. Hastily cropped and blurry in some areas, these images have become the basis for a series of sublime paintings on view at Devening Projects in Chicago.
Karin Davie’s new sense of self
Contributed by Sharon Butler/ At Chart, Karin Davie, in her first NYC show since 2007, has moved with elegant decisiveness from pop-inflected stripes, slapdash and dripping, to wide, sine-wave brushstrokes that gently oscillate in glowing geometric formations.
Caroline Kent: A set of symbols
Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Caroline Kent, a painter based in Chicago, is having her first show at Casey Kaplan. She makes schematic abstract paintings, which have aspects of doubled, mirror-like imagery. An underlying fiction of her art is the presence of twins, Victoria and Veronica, who speak to each other and to the painter�s audience via the works she creates. Kent�s sign-like abstraction involves a set of symbols whose meaning depends not on any explicitly prescribed content but rather on their visual orientation in terms of form and placement.
Pam Glick’s code theory
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Artists often have generative strategies for jumpstarting a work. The AbExers had their automatism and the minimalists had their procedural arrangements. For her new paintings, on display at The Journal Gallery in their rotating Tennis Elbow series, Pam Glick seems to embrace both the automatic and the procedural.
Andrew Cranston’s dazzling seduction
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I try not to go to galleries alone. If I dont have someone to moderate me and make sure that I spend an appropriate amount of time viewing work, I can speed through without sufficiently absorbing it, to my own detriment. Yet, even on my own, I was immediately captivated by Andrew Cranstons deceptively quiet, soft paintings in his current show Waiting for the Bell at Karma.
Alyssa Klauer’s queer phantasmagoria
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Is the detectable hand of the artist evidence of a unique creator, or is gesture mainly indicative of earlier painters touches, the ghosts of art history? More broadly, do we choose the course of our own lives or are they predestined? These thoughts about individual sensibility and personal agency occurred to me while viewing Alyssa Klauers fine, visually and intellectually energized solo show Dare Me, on view at Olympia on the Lower East Side.
The inside creates the outside, and vice versa
A conversation between artists Robin Hill and Elisa DArrigo, whose solo show at Elizabeth Harris is on view through July 31.
Matthew Wong: Fearless to the end
Despite Matthew Wong’s relatively banal subject matter essentially, nature the way it is handled in the exhibition on view at Cheim and Read elevates the art and makes it enthralling, like secrets gently whispered.
