Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, March 20, 2023
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Stephen Maine’s abstract paintings, on view at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, hit you head-on with their optically charged surfaces and imposing presence. The gallery, which has a penchant for showing large-scale work, is exhibiting in its main space several of Maine’s signature “residue paintings” – spongy, all-over compositions with gorgeous, saturated colors in acrylic on canvas – that are over eight feet by six feet.
Contributed by David Carrier / “Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America” at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art focuses on the pre-Clement Greenberg American art world – before Abstract Expressionism had triumphed, before the high-pressure commercial gallery system had been established, before American painters self-consciously sought to extend the traditions of European modernism, before they assumed the burden of building on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. Yet it’s important not to exaggerate that admitted hinge-point in art history. In the 1930s, prominent art dealers like Sidney Janis championed some of the outsider cadre as heartily as he would young Abstract Expressionists, and New York galleries hung their work as well as that of future American art stars they would later fete.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / Seeing a selection of Li Trincere’s works from 1986–90 and 2020-21, I realized to review her show one would have to establish a context for her work. Thinking about that, I realized she is part of a lost generation of abstract painters, which consist of various groupings of artists working in styles rooted in the hard-edge, geometric tradition. What these artists have in common is they resist the industrial aesthetic of Pop and Minimalism.
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.
Renée Khatami, whose recent work is on view in “Behind the Pale,” a solo show at Prince Street Gallery, has developed an intensely methodical art-making process and produced a luminous body of work that seems to transcend the frustrations and anxieties of contemporary life.
We lose a few days in February, so there isn’t any time for procrastinating. Among the early-closing must-sees are David Deutsch’s solo at Eva Pressenhuber, Claudia Keep at March (recently reviewed), and the exhibition of sculptors’ drawings that Carl D’Alvia organized at Helena Anrather. New shows include Erika Ranee’s first solo at Klaus von Nichtssagend (opens Feb 18) and Brenda Goodman at Sikkema Jenkins (opens today). And, finally, Paul Pagk’s outstanding show at Miguel Abreu is required viewing.
Is February the new March? Take a look at the number of interesting shows opening in the Hudson Valley this month and you’ll see what I mean.
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.
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
