The following letter was recently found by construction workers rebuilding the foundation of an old house in Trier. It has been translated from the Dutch by Laurie Fendrich, whose command of Dutch is, well, elementary….
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Chris Martin: Staring into the sun
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Chris Martin is deep into a nearly five-decade-long artistic odyssey fueled by an unrelenting passion for process, spontaneity, and embracing the unexpected. His prolific energy, both physical and creative, melds into his broad knowledge of painting history and an insatiable desire to share his thoughts, feelings, and vast collection of everyday ephemera and small objects by embedding them in paint on canvas. Martin’s paintings are bursts of assemblage showcasing the power of proximity – vibrant cacophonies of glitter, pages ripped from textbooks books, magazine remnants, letters, and newspaper clippings. “Speed of Light,” his second solo exhibition with Timothy Taylor, draws inspiration from the dark night sky in the Catskills, inflecting profound questions about the universe with a comedian’s flair for the seriously absurd. The results are thought-provoking, funny, and, at times, ecstatic.
Diana Cooper: The energy of New York
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Diana Cooper’s new public art project “Double Take” is rich with art historical references and playful wit, breathing life into an otherwise unsightly ventilator shaft installed opposite the egress from the Roosevelt Island subway tunnel, where it blocks a magnificent view of the city across the East River. The mosaic, crafted in collaboration with glass artists in Italy, incorporates fractured and twisted linear perspective to create the illusion of roiling depth, blurring the boundary between static skyscrapers and the roaring East River.
Theresa Hackett: Fractured, folded, flattened landscapes
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In her solo show “The Scenic Route” at High Noon, Theresa Hackett remains committed to a process of reimagining nature through abstraction, texture, and bold compositions. Inspired by the dynamic interplay of form and environment, the show echoes the pastoral and sublime themes of classical landscape art – where balance and harmony were paramount – while pushing boundaries with modern kick. Like the early modernist Oscar Bluemner, Hackett’s paintings are – and long have been – architectural distillations of landscapes, structured yet only symbolically realistic.
Kate Shepherd: Feel me
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Kate Shepherd’s 2025 exhibition “ABC and sometimes Y,” at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, hums in the space between precision and poetry. The paintings are specific and unshowy, rendered in colors that Shepherd selects for their emotional undercurrents. She teases out big questions: How do we interact with the world? How can we untangle what we see? And how do color and form quietly alter our perceptions? The result is a kind of geometric sorcery whereby shapes don’t sit still – they shimmer, shift, and keep you guessing. Every line, every wobble feels heartbreakingly human, which is extraordinary for geometric abstraction.
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, January 2025 (Updated)
January news: Astonishing. Completely astonishing. Thanks to you, Two Coats of Paint raised about 20% more last year than in 2023, setting a record for our year-end fundraising campaigns. Due in large part to the Open House art and merch sale in December, this result affords us the resources to continue operating: to pay the server fees and the writers and to craft an online publication that matters to the NYC art community and beyond. Your donations and purchases, combined with our modest advertising revenue and your generous recurring contributions, will keep the lights on….
David Humphrey: The revel is in the details
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The phenomenon of the selfie, an artifact of the smart phone, is a supreme irony. The act itself suggests a narcissistic preoccupation with recording one’s presence, but its frequency and ubiquity indicates that it doesn’t matter much what person or place gets that honor. Warhol’s fleeting fifteen minutes is compressed into a pandering fraction of a second. I was here; please care. The only auto-photographers who really seem to get durably noticed are the Darwin Award winners whose acrobatic exertions towards drama topple them into the lethal maw of treacherous vistas. Lost in the scree of evanescent look-at-me images is the self in full social and political context, and it’s not in plain sight. There are few painters better suited for excavating it than David Humphrey, as he demonstrates in “porTraits,” his formidable solo exhibition now up at Fredericks & Freiser. Humphrey’s crowning gift – born of comprehensive technical and aesthetic command, a uniquely graphic allusive approach, sardonic wit, and an irrepressible narrative impulse – is to coordinate the nuances of disparate visual elements so finely as to render the busiest of paintings piercingly, disturbingly coherent.
Emily Noelle Lambert: Trapping butterflies, chasing wild birds
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions.
Hudson Valley (+vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide: January 2025
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / December is the month for small works and holiday group shows, such as LABspace’s annual “HOLIDAY” show featuring 400 artists and “ALL small” at Pamela Salisbury. There are a few weeks left to see Chie Fueki’s “Petal Storm Memory and Non-Objectified” at Kino Saito; “When the Spirit Moves You” and Eve Biddle’s “I have time for death and rebirth” at Geary; and “All At Once” at SEPTEMBER. December 6 is the opening of “The 5 by 7 Show” at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, marking the 25th anniversary of this popular fundraising exhibition. On December 7, Front Room Gallery celebrates their 25th anniversary with an exhibition of gallery artists. For this edition of the guide I have also included artist and maker fairs and pop up shows taking place at galleries and art spaces throughout the region. Shop local and give the gift of art this season!
Art’s political economy: A response to Dean Kissick
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / In “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art” in the December issue of Harper’s, Dean Kissick presents a provocative critique, arguing that since the 1990s art’s politicized expressions of discomfort have diminished its quality and impact. As a remedy, he calls for artists to return to romantic ideals of beauty, strangeness, and emotion. He contends that artists should prioritize innovation and aesthetic rigor while focusing on universal human experience rather than political correctness. While his case is compelling on the surface, Kissick overlooks crucial historical and economic factors that have affected the art world. The shift in art’s focus is a result of not only political engagement but also a complex interplay of post-industrial social, economic, and cultural forces that emerged in the 1960s and have led to changes in how art is created, valued, and consumed.
Trevor Winkfield: From Leeds to eternity
Contributed by Elizabeth Hazan / During the night of election-related insomnia, I was thinking about how we find meaning in this crazy world and that reading personal histories can be life-affirming in a time of chaos. One of the delights of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women was learning how all these artists who were fixtures in the art world when I was a child came to New York to start making art in the first place. For a number of years, I shared a studio with the artist Trevor Winkfield. While he has done some long-form interviews, I think his lively storytelling deserves fresh attention.
Emily Berger: See Emily paint
Contributed by Peter Schroth / In “Spirit Level,” Emily Berger’s solo show at Starr Suites, she continues to expose the depths of a kind of abstract painting that she has intriguingly investigated and perfected over the past decade. Her minimal compositions are poised confidently between the formal and the lyrical. There is an almost primitive simplicity to what she reveals and purposefully little made of light, movement, and space in the ways we would typically anticipate.
Gary Stephan’s steadfast modernism
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Gary Stephan has been an abstract painter for over fifty years. His command of that vocation – touch, line, color, concept – is duly acknowledged. But he is far from content. Stephan came of age at what was arguably the extended peak of modernism, when creative people across the board presumed to tackle existential problems for the ages.
What the hell is water? How Instagram hurts art
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / For the past eight years, I’ve been merrily swimming along in the waters of Instagram without once stopping to ask what it is. My first post was on December 10, 2016 – five weeks and four days after Trump won his first presidential election, when, like many people, I was devastated. I thought Instagram might bring me out of my post-election torpor. Rapidly scrolling through my feed, posting images (especially of art), seeing what my artist friends were posting, and discovering new art and artists initially felt
Francesco Clemente’s visual facility
Contributed by David Carrier / I have been writing a book about art in the churches of Naples’ historic center. There I also visited the new Kunsthalle Madre, which contains an elaborate two-story permanent installation by Francesco Clemente called “Ave Ovo.” Like baroque Catholic art, Clemente’s work features elaborate symbolism. While the old masters employed it to present church dogma, his symbolism is personal and more elusive. In Naples, however, both exhibit a penchant for sensory overload: more is more. In his splendid show “Summer Love in the Fall,” now at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Clemente still uses some of the same symbols – male and female body parts, his own portrait – but the colors in its 23 paintings are more subdued. The title may well refer to the psychic place of erotic images in his later life as well as the timing of this exhibition, for now his work seems more serene.
