Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Contributed by Julia Bland / Odili Donald Odita’s abstract paintings in “Burning Cross,” at Jack Shainman Gallery, are bright and rhythmic, drawing from European and American modernists as well as textiles from Nigeria, his country of birth. Works like Represent and Opus, X complicate geometric patterning with subtle shifts and contradictions, continually setting and thwarting the viewer’s expectations.
Contributed by Adam Simon / I almost decided not to write about Paul Pagk’s first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu on the Lower East Side after reading Raphael Rubinstein’s eloquent press statement. Rubinstein articulated so much of what struck me about the exhibition that I wondered what I could add. One thing Rubinstein alludes to but doesn’t explore in depth is the chasm that separates an initial glance at a Pagk painting from longer consideration of his work in person. For viewers not attuned to the ways painters glean meaning from forms and materials, these paintings might appear overly reductive, mere diagrams on fields of monochrome. You tend to take in a Pagk canvas quickly, as a one-to-one relationship of image to ground without a lot of interacting parts. It’s easy to miss the many ways in which his false starts, reiterations, miscues, and reworkings belie his apparent minimalism and austerity.
Contributed by Zach Seeger /As the story goes, James Rosenquist’s images were inspired by his experience as a sign painter in the late 1950s. Blue-collar toil transcended the quotidian and informed not only the scale but also the imagery of Rosenquist’s paintings. The work seemed the most obvious new iteration of modernist opportunism, embracing culture’s latest ready-made: advertising. It did not elevate the artist to greater marketability through grand exhibition, however, but merely led to the appropriation of popular images for display on canvas in galleries. While the paintings sought to deconstruct the PR of capitalism (recall Edward Bernays’ “add an egg”), they also served to keep the capitalist machine humming. In juxtaposiing 20th-century American abstraction and 21st-century images of 19th-century landscape painting, Joani Tremblay tries to avoid this kind of regression in her solo show “Intericonicity” at Harper’s Chelsea 512.
Contributed by Martin Bromirski / I first saw Claudia Keep’s paintings in a recent Jay Gorney Instagram post of her current show “Aubade” at March, in the East Village. The first of the three images Jay posted is of a swimmer, the figure all dashes of refraction under green waves, and the third image a summery painting of a small white garage dappled in sunshine and shadows from a nearby tree. Jay wrote, “small tender paintings.” I went to the gallery website to see more and was happy to learn that she lives here in Vermont, and we were able to set up a studio visit.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / The covetous, dismissive, playful title of Don Doe’s 490 Atlantic show, “I’ll Have What They’re Having,” aptly conveys the work’s lively yet frustrated romanticism. Painting from collages, Doe mixes bodies and genders, scale and spatial orientation, subject and object, high and low culture – all held together in a solid but illogical cubistic order. The few sculptures included show sophisticated facility and prioritize the grotesque. The viewer is manipulated through surprising twists and turns.
Contributed by Peter Malone / “Long story short” could describe many an art review, but here it is also the name of one of a growing number of pocket galleries along the section of Henry Street beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Long Story Short NYC recently hosted an exhibition of a dozen of Siobhan McBride’s small but compelling paintings, titled “Always Means Never Not” and curated by Stavroula Coulianidis.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine, annoyed by the knowing ellipticality of a New Yorker cartoon caption, marches into the august magazine’s offices and confronts the editor – portrayed to preppy-geek perfection by the late Edward Herrmann – about its meaning. After offering several generic, pretentious, and abjectly unconvincing interpretations, he admits that he has no idea what the hell the caption is supposed to mean. Jeff Gabel – whose elaborately narrated drawings and paintings, a few site-specific, are presently on display in a solo at Spencer Brownstone Gallery on the Lower East Side and a group show at Jennifer Baahng Gallery on the Upper East Side – runs no such risk, abjuring obscure glibness for mordantly wise, sourly penetrating bloviation.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Rob de Oude’s exquisitely painted geometric abstractions, on display at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, at once resist and invite scrutiny. Though wholly handmade, they are all composed of small squares that appear so perfect, calmingly symmetrical, and plain beautiful as to discourage a closer look: there’s nothing more to see here, and what you see is fine enough. But his patterns – both over the expanse of the canvas and within each rectangle – are so intricate and their variations so subtle that a hard look turns out to be compulsory and in fact rewarding.
Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch’s new and recent work at Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea are set in dialogue with The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise, a magnificent 1533 stained-glass window by Renaissance master Valentin Bousch. “Lux and Lumen,” the exhibition’s title, comes from Abbot Suger of the cathedral at Saint-Denis, who praised the power of stained glass to transform natural light, or lux, into sacred light, or lumen. Inspired by that medieval idea, and by his visit to Claude Monet’s pond and garden at Giverny, Finch’s Painting Air, an immersive hanging-glass installation, is a dramatic visual essay on light.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / On one level, in “Flex, Rot, and Sp(l)it,” a penetrating and conceptually cohesive show of paintings at Nathalie Karg Gallery, Heidi Hahn visually chronicles the tension between the unavoidable confinement of the body and the irrepressible expansiveness of the mind. While the so-called mind-body problem is as old as philosophy itself, to Western audiences it is perhaps most resonant in René Descartes’ exercise of systematic doubt, concluding with “I think therefore I am.” In terms of value, this ingrained formulation privileges the mind over the body. While philosophers are left to connect mental processes with gray matter, for painters and others it can be discomfiting to realize that although thinking is supposed to be the essence of being, a person’s mind is often prejudged on the basis of their body’s characteristics.
I saw Alicia Feng’s haunting and beautiful graphite drawings at Sunnyside Arts the other day when I popped in to buy a tube of paint. Director Ed Kim tells me that she pens well known graphic novels under a different name.
@sunnysideartsnyc #artsupplies #artstore #drawings #graphite
Latest post, link in profile / Chakaia Booker’s lyrical muscle / Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Making deeper sense of some abstract art past its initial visual impact can require extended consideration. Not so much Chakaia Booker’s sculpture, now on view in her solo show “Public Opinion” at David Nolan Gallery. Composed predominantly of exactingly configured pieces of black rubber tires along with wood and metal, the work immediately grips you like a confident advocate, calm and insistent. Link in profile
@chakaiabooker @davidnolangallery #jonathanstevenson #twocoatsofpaint
Jim Condron has put together a lovable show of crazy sculptures he made using things sourced from other artists and writers. One piece includes a pair of pink crocs — Grace Hartigan’s last painting shoes — and I was reminded of a Rachel Harrison piece I saw this winter @glenstonemuseum . Kind of heartbreaking that Hartigan’s shoes don’t have more paint on them. Swipe for images
Jim Condron: Collected Things
Sculptures from the Collected Items of Artists, Writers and Thinkers
On view through June 17 @artcake_nyc (but closed for Memorial Day Weekend)
Image info:
Grace Hartigan’s Things, 2023
Crocs shoes, paint stick, pillow, steel
antique chair, steel
35 x 45 x35 inches
In the Glenstone collection:
Rachel Harrison, Sculpture with Boots, 2017
wood, polystyrene, chicken wire, cardboard, burlap, cement, acrylic, steel, and pigmented inkjet print
93 x 60 x 46 inches (236 x 152 x 116 cm)
© Rachel Harrison
Rachel Harrison, Sculpture with Boots (detail)
@jimcondron #gracehartigan #leekrasner @pollockkrasnerfoundation #rachelharrison #paintersshoes
(I gave Jim a few coffee pots from my favorite hometown thrift shop —the only store I’ve ever loved. Go see what he did with them ☕️)
On the UES yesterday I stopped in to see Andrea Marie Breiling’s solo
“Swallowtail” at @alminerech. In the press release the artist says that the paintings are like the swallowtail butterflies in that the closer you get to the work, the more the surface begins to reveal its details, but honestly the details don’t really seem important, overwhelmed as they are by the brash color, the mesmerizing circular action of the mark making, and the mural-sized scale. Natural wonder doesn’t stand a chance next to Breiling’s industrial strength vision, but maybe that’s the point. Love the illusion of depth and the sense of light. On view through June 10.
@alminerech @andrea_marie_breiling #futurism #contemporarypainting #LAPainting #LAArtist
Latest post, link in profile / Ethel Schwabacher: Canon-adjacent? / Contributed by David Carrier / Revisionist arguments about who should be counted among the artistic elite, whether they be old masters or modernists, provide essential stimulus in the art world. They proceed in an established manner. Some reasonably influential figure contends that a significant artist has been unjustly excluded from a particular art canon. Commentaries are published and shows organized making the case for supplementing it. The recent amendments to the predominantly white male Abstract Expressionist elite have proven especially tricky, as issues of gender and race enter the picture. Does Alma Thomas belong? Norman Lewis? What about Ethel Schwabacher? With “Woman in Nature (Paintings from the 1950s)”, Berry and Campbell argue energetically, though not entirely convincingly, that she deserves a place. Link in profile
#davidcarrier #ethelschwabacher @berrycampbell #womenpainters #1950spainting #abstractexpressionism @carrier3909 #twocoatsofpaint
Spread across two floors at Magenta Plains, Jennifer Bolande’s solo, “Persistence of Vision” is as compelling as it is enigmatic. Downstairs, Bolande captures images of fragmented scenes and objects (perhaps from dusty road trips in an old muscle car?), a series of moments that manifest deeper meaning. The work upstairs focuses on the handmade. Rachel Kushner, are you out there? Through June 17.
@magentaplains #jenniferbolande #rachelkushner #lesgalleries #magentaplains #persistenceofvision #contemporaryphotography #plastersculpture
This afternoon I spent some time @platformprojectspace talking with artist (and curator for this show) @franklinevansart and gallery director @elizabethhazan during the last day for “Philosophicalinvestigations” a lovable group show that included faded images of exhibitions past and work by artists who are showing for the first time in the space. It has been a glorious celebration of Platform’s first five years 🎉😀🏆 Congratulations Elizabeth and Franklin. Great show.
#philosophicalinvestigations #franklinevans #elizabethhazan #platformprojectspace
Latest post, link in profile / Rita Ackermann’s alternative dimension / Contributed by Jeffrey Grunthaner / Currently on view at MASI Lugano in Lugano, Switzerland, Rita Ackermann’s solo show, “Hidden,” offers a rare melding of museum-oriented historicism with gallery-style directness. Occupying two cavernous rooms in the museum’s bottom floor, the exhibition comprises four bodies of work, ranging from early sketchbook collages prefiguring Ackermann’s iconic “nymph” paintings of the 1990s to more visceral canvases that explore erasure and disappearance. It culminates in three monumental paintings from Ackermann’s most recent series, War Drawings, which recall murals while also resembling magnified pages of an exploded notebook. Link in profile
@ritaackermann @masilugano @shadowblockedthoo #figurativepainting #ritaackermann #jeffreygrunthaler
Shout out to Salon Zürcher, a satellite fair of Frieze New York, for their 28th Edition of “The Women of Spirit” series, on view through May 21. Artists in this iteration include Bettina Blohm, Petey Brown, Sue Collier, Fukuko Harris, Nancy Manter, Victoria Palermo, Sacha Floch Poliakoff, Jo Ann Rothschild, Sonita Singwi, Jenny Tango, April Vollmer
Images are tagged. Sorry I didn’t take more!
@bettinablohm @__petey.brown__ @Sue_Collier @hukuharri @nmanter2 @victoriapalermostudio @sachaflochpoliakoff @jo_ann_rothschild @sonitasingwi #JennyTango @aprilvollmer_artist
#zurchergallery #womenofspirit #friezenewyork @zurcher_gallery @friezenewyork #twocoatsofpaint #womenartists
