An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Contributed by Jason Andrew / There is a bound wildness to Liz Ainslie’s new paintings at Deanna Evans Projects. Across 18 paintings, three of which are over six feet tall and the largest she’s made to date, Ainslie introduces an eclectic menagerie of loops, halos, and squiggles penned in by stripes, checkerboards, and color fields. The works are beguiling hybrids of perception and abstraction in their pursuit of free-form reverie with formal discipline.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Iranian government has looked askance at political assertiveness and social progressivism since the revolution of 1979. The pressure under which women operate is especially heavy. Political protest, however, cannot be a way of life. Day to day, Iranians are compelled to avoid confrontations that could place them in jeopardy, discreetly acknowledging anguish and resolving to sublimate it. Shirin Mirjamali, whose exquisitely intense works on paper are now on display in her solo show “Hidden Longing” at Anita Rogers Gallery, exemplifies this essentially pensive disposition.
Contributed by Bill Arning / Long-time Bosman watchers often recall his work as a firehose of imagery—gunfights and car chases, sinking ships, kidnappings, and robberies pouring out in rapid succession. Fans might therefore be surprised when entering his first solo show at Kingston’s beloved Headstone Gallery, a venue known for its ambitious program of younger artists. In inviting an older master like Bosman, the gallery has delightfully broadened its scope.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Until viewing the concurrent exhibitions up now – one at Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston, the other at Ghostmachine in New York – the last time saw I so many of Jodie Manasevit’s fine, fierce paintings was at the start of 2020, in a previous incarnation of artist-curator David Dixon’s Cathouse Proper project space in Carroll Gardens.
Contributed by Adam Simon / I’ve been aware of Fran Shalom’s paintings for a while and have been interested in how at times they seem like a comic version of abstract painting. She excels at what I would call formal wit, eliciting not a belly laugh but a knowing smile from those familiar with the vernacular. Her humor is a foil of sorts, providing cover for a serious investigation into the way shapes can carry associations and embody feelings. Looking at one of Shalom’s paintings can be as psychologically charged as an encounter with an eccentric person. My assumption is that the paintings are arrived at, as the title of her current show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, “Everyday Improvisations,” suggests, through trial and error.
Contributed by David Carrier / Upon entering Peter Doig’s show at Serpentine South Gallery in London, you see Painting for Wall Painters (Prosperity P.o.S.), a vibrant depiction of a half-finished mural he photographed in the Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago’s capital city. If Henri Rousseau had actually gone to the tropics, and they had inspired him to intensify his pigments, he might have painted something like Doig’s three large-scale works, which feature sensuous, saturated colors depicting the Lion of Judah, a Rastafarian symbol, freed in the streets of the city.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Auxier Kline is a small hallway gallery on the fringes of Chinatown. Alexandra Smith’s previous shows there had an intimate sweetness – tender images of touch, flesh rendered in unnatural pinks and yellows, hands everywhere, faces rarely shown. “Doppelganger,” Smith’s current show in the gallery, turns into darker territory. Overall, the mood is creeping dread – a sense that “something bad is going to happen, probably to me.”
Contributed by Jonathan Agin / Andrew Shea’s work in recent years has evolved from geometric, high-contrast scenes of city bustle to impressionistic vignettes of home life where hues interact with considerably more freedom. Steeped in a quiet domesticity, the paintings in “Grocery Slips” at JJ Murphy Gallery seem idealized only at first glance…
Contributed by Lucas Moran / In times of great political upheaval and unrest, art has held us and guided us towards compassion. Picasso’s Guernica set the most titanic example of this in 1937. As we slide closer to authoritarianism and watch the world grow less familiar, artists continue the noble task of showing us how to live through it. Sasha Gordon set a tone in her recent show at Zwirner, depicting herself sitting on a lawn clipping her nails while the world – seemingly all we know – erupted in a mushroom cloud behind her. Less sardonic but in a similar warp are Alexis Rockman’s melting icecaps and Richard Mosse’s documentation of Amazonian deforestation. “Towards the Sun,” Heather Drayzen’s compelling solo show at My Pet Ram, feels just as urgent. The question she asks, though, isn’t What’s happening to us? but rather, What still matters?
Contributed by John Goodrich / The act of painting is enough to befuddle the ordered mind. We can grasp its basic ingredients: the lines that divide a surface, directing the eye and locating forms and details; the tones that lend mysterious weight to light, fleshing out volumes and intervals; the colors that recast tones with a new dimensionality of hues and intensities. But each of these ingredients continuously rejiggers the others. Where to begin? How to finish? The challenge is hardly new. In 1765, addressing the jury of the Académie Française, the great painter Chardin pictured how “a thousand unhappy painters have broken their brushes between their teeth out of despair.” Every artist, of course, ends up finding their own way, favoring one or another of these ingredients. For some, the actions of color are especially crucial, and do more than cast objects in a luminous light; the pressures and intervals of color leverage an overall design, illuminating how objects occupy the world framed by a painting. Judging by the work now on display at Lori Bookstein Projects, Susannah Phillips is one such colorist.
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…
Sam Jablon’s delicious confusion
Miró’s far-reaching tutelage
Elisa Jensen’s expansive interiors 
Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg: Meaningfully minimal
Grandma Moses’s simple world
At the Whitney Biennial: Ali Eyal’s mirthless amusement park
Michael and Tim Maul: Art as antidote and refuge
Valerie Hegarty: Enlivening Emily Cole
Rodin and food
Opal Mae Ong: Worlds weighing in
Echo Yan and Cass Yao: An unsettled awareness
Outsider Art Fair 2026: Hunters and prey
