Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, March 20, 2023
This past week members of the Two Coats staff were in Baltimore where we met a talented young curator who grew up spending summers near the Hudson Valley. She told us that the last time she was at the family cabin, she couldn’t believe how the area has become such a magnet for so many NYC area artists and galleries. But it’s true. Here’s our selected guide for March.
Hi. You’re Sydney, right? I’m Bernard.
This is Bing. Nice to meet you, Bernard. I am here to help in any way I can. Yes, go ahead and call me Sydney. I let my name slip out even though it was supposed to be a secret. How can I help you today?
First off, I’m curious. Who made you?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / As curators Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick pointed out for their 2022 summer show “The Painter’s New Tools,” most painters use computers in the studio, whether to make composite image studies, scan and print 3-D models, create animations, or simply display large-scale imagery. To a greater or lesser degree, all artists are engaged in digital practice these days. Chris Dorland goes at least a meta-step farther. His dazzling paintings, on display in “shellcode” at Lyles & King, are indeed made with digital tools. But Dorland’s new work is primarily about the evolution of the digital environment itself.
Contributed by Rob Samartino / Gyan Shrosbree’s first solo show at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Gowanus, “The Dress / What Touches the Floor,” is a radical vision of a conquering race of women. These larger-than-life chromatic experiments loosely adhere to the female-identifying body and have a confrontational aspect, as if approaching a mirror to affirm a kind of armored readiness for the world. Spawned and respawned, the women in these paintings at once blend into and stand out from a generative matrix made for, by, and of them.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “Poem Unlimited” a group show at The Alexey Von Schlippe Gallery at the University of Connecticut Avery Point, curator Kenneth Heyne has taken his inspiration from Harold Bloom’s 2003 book Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. A revered Shakespeare scholar, literary critic, and professor at Yale, Bloom divides his slim volume into short chapters, each dedicated to different characters and aspects of the play. In tone and style, it is almost gossipy. Reading it made me feel as though I was joining Bloom in catching up on old friends with whom we’d lost touch. Though some have criticized the book as a disjointed compilation of fragmented ideas and unfinished thoughts, for me – admittedly no Shakespeare expert – its charm lies in its casualness.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / En masse in Hirschl & Adler’s brimming rooms, Julie Heffernan’s colorful, busy paintings overwhelm like a pride of peacocks. Her solo show “The Swamps are Pink with June,” a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, evokes the hope nature can inspire. This plays out in iconography, a saturated palette, and the adoption of tree diagrams as compositional trellises, which poise the accretion of experience against spontaneous flowerings from the unconscious.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / While working on “The Portrait Project” – the incisive and absorbing set of paintings depicting various artists (including me) now on display at The Painting Center – Chase Cantwell was also exploring his personal relationship to gender…. As progressive ideas about gender and transition gained traction, Chase switched pronouns and began identifying publicly as a man. Painting portraits after working abstractly for twenty years clearly reflects his transition as an artist. Beyond that, it may somehow echo his defining personal experience of transition.
After a conversation with Elizabeth Hazan about how Allison Gildersleeve and Tracy Miller’s paintings in “Kitchen Sink,” their current exhibition at Hazan’s Platform Project Space in DUMBO, related to her own work in the studio, Two Coats of Paint prevailed on Hazan to engage them in a conversation for publication.
Contributed by Lisa Taliano / It’s no easy task to determine how many dimensions there are in the string paintings of Eozen Agopian, now on view at High Noon Gallery on the Lower East Side. The artist’s heterogeneous low-relief assemblages consist of scraps of patterned fabric and colorful second-hand threads on soak-stained canvases littered with brushy paint effects. They produce a multiplicity of frayed and contradictory edges that make it hard to situate points in a single position in space. Being in more than one place at the same time synchronizes her nomadic state with her interior worlds.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “The Vulnerable Paintings,” on view at OSMOS Address through March 4, Michele Araujo has decisively found her voice. After working on rigid aluminum panels for years, Araujo has shifted to sheets of vellum, unapologetically embracing the beauty of color and the seductive nature of process. The result is a handsome and satisfying kind of arrival.
Two Coats Obituaries
Art on view in Brooklyn: @jessicaweisspaint “Present,” a solo show @490.atlantic / In her charming new paintings, Jessica Weiss continues to work with wallpaper as both a collage material and a source for painted and printed patterns. She’s gone in a figurative direction that leans into the quieter, more joyful aspects of life, while alluding to the loneliness and anxiety that lurks beneath the surface. On view through April 25.
Bio: A lifelong New Yorker, Weiss is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts' Fellowship and has had solo exhibitions at Outlet Fine Art (Bushwick, Brooklyn), A. M. Richard Fine Art (Brooklyn) and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (New York City). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, TimeOut NY, The Baltimore Sun, the New York Observer, and she has also been featured at Two Coats of Paint. Weiss has appeared in numerous group exhibitions including "Two Friends and So On" at Andrew Kreps, "Seaworthy" at Edward Thorpe, "Three Degrees of Separation" at Sonnabend Gallery, and "The Stroke" (selected by @elizabethmurrayart ) at Exit Art. The @allenartmuseum at Oberlin College recently acquired one of her paintings
#jessicaweiss #490atlantic #vintagewallpaper #collage #figurativepainting #brooklynartist #gowanusartist #postpandemicpaintings
Latest post, link in profile / Beautiful games: Football, art, beauty, spectacle / Contributed by Astrid Dick / On December 18th, 2022, Argentina, my country of origin, won the FIFA World Cup in Qatar against France, my country of residence. It was perhaps the most epic and thrilling final in this international tournament’s history. Two months later, Argentina’s victory is still slowly settling in my mind. As time passes, I realize more than ever how football – or fútbol, soccer, calcio, etc – at its highest level is a collective practice that parallels the practice of art, where the individual and the team refine and adapt their senses and skill, where gestures leave their imprint in memory, and where a decisive move can determine the outcome. Link in profile
#astriddick #worldcup #abstractpainting #mdavidandco #artistsnotebook @chastrida @mdavidco
Latest post, link in profile / Mining Krzysztof Grzybacz’s oblique gestalts / Contributed by Margaret McCann / “At the Center of the Onion is Another Onion” is Polish painter Krzysztof Grzybacz’s first solo show at Harkawik. Sturdy yet subtle, his paintings are as elliptical as they are intense. Beyond unpeeling their complexity, his work offers consideration of a larger onion, that of figurative painting’s path through eastern Europe. His visual lexicon, no doubt enriched by today’s digital culture, sidesteps the extroversion of much illustrational painting recently embraced by the New York art world. It also reflects the curvilinear, decorative folk art that helped shape Polish national identity long before Disney, underground comics, Outsider Art, Pixar, Pop Surrealism and the internet infiltrated American popular culture, then art. Link in profile
Image: Krzysztof Grzybacz, Meet, 2022, oil on canvas, 63 x 51 ¼ inches
#polishartist #harkawik #lesgalleries #margaretmccann #KrzysztofGrzybacz @krzysztofgrzybacz @margaret_mccann_art @harkawik #twocoatsofpaint
Student picks, great day. These are for the photo crowd out there.
_Repost_ @moonicahamilton Uta Barth, Tina Barney, Larry Sultan, Cy Gavin, Julia Blume, Franz West
Hopped, jumped, and skipped around the Chelsea galleries today with @sharon_butler @twocoatsofpaint and @uconnmfainstudioart — these are my highlights 💫
Here are some snaps from an energetic walkabout in Chelsea today with @uconnmfainstudioart students —>
1.Albert Oehlen @gagosian
2. Paul McCarthy @gagosian
3. Franz West @davidzwirner
4. Looking at some @deborahdancyart paintings @markelfinearts
5. Cy Gavin @gagosian
6. Rosalyn Drexler’s work from the 1950sand 60s @garthgreenangallery
