An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, January 6, 2026
David Humphrey: I’m going to improvise this conversation, but I have a thought to start with that has to do with the title of your show, against interpretation. I want to think about each of those words separately and then spin it into a conversation….
Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Paul Feeley: The Shape of Things” is Garth Greenan Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for the painter, who died in 1966. But it is the first to ask – and answer – what happened when Feeley, known for re-introducing geometry to post-war abstraction, grew tired of his signature style. This show at last gives proper attention to Feeley’s drive to move beyond the flatness of the canvases he had been producing for years.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / “A Decade: 2012–22” is the first show of Cora Cohen’s work since her death in 2023. It includes a broad range of her late paintings and drawings, which reflect what might perhaps be called her “formalism” – a term that when applied to Cohen, resists any terminal definition, promise of unity, or set of rules. Her 50-year career frustrates linear narration, but what remained consistent across her varied approaches to painting was an unwavering commitment to abstract painting as a process-driven pursuit.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In an explosion of color and clutter, Marta Lee’s new work, on view at Tappeto Volante in Gowanus, shakes up the revered tradition of still life painting. Lee fills her paintings with the “material archive of her life” – digital clock radios, toys from childhood, record albums, family heirlooms, and pride flags. She plays with how memory and context shape our visual experience, bringing perception into personal life and exploring the accrual of meaning through painting.
Contributed by David Carrier / To be a happy art critic, perhaps you need to be ready to fall in love – at least with a picture. I have a friend, a very distinguished intellectual, who some years ago fell in love with a famous work of art. He has read all the literature about this picture, written about it, and made repeated pilgrimages to see it. On one occasion, curious about his obsession, I accompanied him to take a look. I certainly admire his picture…
Contributed by Amanda Church / Marina Adams has long been exploring the range of allusions that can be conjured by various color combinations and the scale and placement of simple shapes, which press up and vibrate against each other in subtle, sexy ways. Curvy configurations, interspersed with diamonds and triangles, hint at myriad aspects of nature and the female form. In Adams’ current show “Cosmic Repair” at Timothy Taylor, variations on this trajectory continue in nine paintings, all new and acrylic on linen except Singing to the Highest Deity from 2020 hanging by itself in the back room. Influences range from Matisse to, according to the press release, “Uzbek textiles, Indigenous American Southwest pottery, and the Great Pyramids.”
Contributed by Adam Simon / Paul Gardère (1944–2011), whose work is now on view in “Second Nature” at Magenta Plains, is known for a unique version of combine paintings, incorporating assemblage, found objects, photography, dirt and glitter into works that critique the legacy of colonialism in Haiti and its diaspora. The problem with this narrative is that it undersells how formally innovative his work was in its time, the degree to which it stems from his own biography, and how it anticipated our current multi-screen reality.
Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch is fascinated by Japan, which he first visited some 50 years ago, when he was a teenager. “One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige),” his current exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, includes four installations grounded in that experience. Fourteen Stones, inspired by a Japanese Zen garden and made with ordinary concrete bricks, encompasses simulacra of fifteenth-century garden stones. Even these banal objects, Finch suggests, warrant contemplation. For Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), he has installed stained glass to evoke Japanese moon-viewing. Four LED sculptures present images that recast traditional Japanese haikus through lit color schemes. And Finch’s 42 watercolors reference Utagawa Hiroshige’s renowned One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, made in 1856–58, through present-day New York.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I saw my favorite piece of Cady Noland ephemera before I ever saw one of her sculptures. On Instagram, a gallery posted a photo of a tee-shirt. It’s well loved and sun-faded, advertising the opening of Noland’s solo show at American Fine Arts on Wooster Street. The date of the opening is September 11, 2001. Opening the same day, across Canal Street on Broadway, was a show by Gelatin (Gelitin since 2005) at Leo Koenig’s gallery. The year before, the group had gone up to the 91st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and hung out a window. Josh Harris, founding Silicon Alley millionaire/internet pioneer/legendary liar, took photos from a helicopter. The Gelatin show was sparsely attended. I don’t know if anyone made it to Cady’s.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Susan Rothenberg’s exhibition “The Weather,” now up at Hauser & Wirth, is a rare chance to experience the breadth and intensity of one of most vital influences in American painting. The exhibition gathers fourteen works from across her career – horses, fragmented bodies, and spectral forms – some rarely or never before exhibited. Rothenberg told the LA Times in 1983 that she liked to think of the subjects in her paintings as being “swept along in unconfined space by forces of weather” – rendered in thermal swirls and blizzardy brush marks – and the exhibition is structured around this idea.
Contributed by Mary Jones / Exuberance is a word frequently used in describing the work of JoAnne Carson, and, in “Cosmic Chatter,” her first solo show at DC Moore, it’s in hyperdrive. Twelve large, colorful paintings share the main gallery space with one eight-by-six-foot monochromatic sculpture of an intricately crafted white flowering tree. Placed near the entrance, the sculpture serves as a three-dimensional model and introduction to the paintings. The fragile delicacy of this surprising and marvelous object resembles an encounter with a conjured specimen preserved in ice, a fact among fiction.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If On Kawara’s monumentally quotidian work was about the objective significance of the simple passage of time, Robert Yoder’s may be, in turn, about the subjective importance of each passing moment however uneventful. “I Was the Other Conversation,” his solo exhibition of untitled paintings (and one beguiling wooden carving) now up at Frosch & Co., continues his discerning visual exploration of how, psychically, people live.
Contributed by Doug Milford / Good art can have multiple sources of meaning – material, color, scale, intention, chance, change, process, metaphor, ontology, epistemology, philosophy, biography, zeitgeist, history, and more. These may or may not be apparent or even deliberate, but they make up the work’s internal structure and shape its style. Ideally though certainly not always, these influences operate in concert while remaining distinct. The nine works in Claudia Parducci’s exhibition “Blue”, at Ochi Gallery in Los Angeles in February and March, achieve this balance, both as individual pieces and as an ensemble. The six years that had passed since her previous show included a three-year hiatus from painting after the death of her husband, the artist Peter Alexander, in 2020. This body of work was a response to his passing.
Contributed by Mark Wethli / Technical drawing – the kind we see in plans, elevations, and orthogonal perspectives – is not the obvious choice to explore feelings of isolation, sadness, or loss. For over a century, the painterly gesture has been the primary signifier of these emotions, while drafting has been the province of the designer and the engineer. Given this disparity, Tom Butler’s choice of this medium, in his show “I Became a Room” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, is a surprising one; not for its own sake but the result of a creative process that transforms the art of technical drawing in unexpected and meaningful ways.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s current show at the Interchurch Center on the Upper West Side, comprising close to 50 works, sheds generous light on her process, range and subject matter. The exhibition’s title, “Beneath the Trees it Rains,” conveys the dynamism of Whittaker-Doe’s landscapes, which demonstrate nature’s seasonal abundance and power.
