An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice,” Mark Bradford’s galvanizing tour de force at Hauser & Wirth, was a three-story exhibition of arresting coherence. His muscular paintings grab you by the lapels, pull you in, and visually immerse you to a point of satisfying comprehension.
Contributed by D. Dominick Lombardi / The 2023 Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art, titled “Curating Commemoration: Poesis/Remedy,” is presented in two related exhibitions in the WaterFire Arts Center, a large, beautifully converted US Rubber Company manufacturing facility originally built in 1929. In keeping with the enterprise’s original mission of infusing high-end curation and presentation with the outsider spirit of the local Providence scene, the exhibition features a rich, wide range of work, from performance, music and design to photography, sculpture and painting.
Contributed by David Carrier / Born in Russia at the very start of this century, Ester Petukhova is a Pittsburgh resident. Her precocious new show includes seven small acrylic paintings, two of them with two parts, on shaped panels. Burgeoning Blue Screen shows a Russian at work on an old-fashioned computer. Indexed Landmarks 1 & 2 depicts a man, naked to the waist, holding a large fish. And Bread with Salt in the Wound presents a large loaf of bread, and is enhanced with glass beads. “It is a customary Slavic tradition,” the gallery label says, “to present bread with salt when welcoming a foreign nation or power.” Welcome, then, to the former Soviet Union.
Contributed by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi / In the 1970s, Jack Whitten developed a unique painting language driven by process and concept and characterized by material experimentation, dense luminosities, and multidimensionality. This exhibition brings together forty works from Whitten’s land- mark Greek Alphabet series, realized in his downtown New York studio between 1975 and 1978. The paintings were on view at DIA Beacon through July 10, 2023.
Contributed by Elizabeth Scheer / Though I am no longer in the art world, my career is more lucrative and fulfilling than I could have ever imagined. I am well-known and beloved among my clientele, and I make a great deal of money. The title of my profession cannot be named, as it would not be in the best interest of either my clients or me. Everyone who knows me, however, knows I owe the triumphs of the last decade to the events I am about to relate, which catalyzed my discovery of my true talents. With that in mind, the moral of this story might be to remain open to all of life’s possibilities.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I’ve always thought of non-objective art as an especially challenging type of abstraction that doesn’t rely on a visual relationship to the world for meaning. Rather, it conveys meaning through metaphor, material choices, and processes. Sometimes text is incorporated, and, in painting, color and compositional selections play important roles. But the underlying ideas are equally important. Non-objective artists like to mull and ruminate, creating work that gives the viewer something to not only to experience but also to think about. In “I am the Passenger” a two-part group show at Mother Gallery in Beacon, NY, artist-curators Paola Oxao, Trudy Benson, and Russell Tyler articulate two key aspects of non-objective approaches. One is the relationship that non-objective art has with the body – sight, touch, and proximity. The second is the mysterious ability of materials – through texture, shape, and color – to “stir something” that is both personal and universal, as the stars and the sky do in the passenger of Iggy Pop’s eponymous song. The work in the second part of the project, now on view, focuses on this uncanny allure.
Contributed by Jason Stopa / An international survey at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University explores how contemporary artists use abstraction to encode otherwise invisible realities: climate change, political strife, and inequalities of all stripes. Some are household names, others still emerging. Titled “So it appears,” the show is anything but timid. It boasts some 19 artists occupying three floors, each one grappling with the limits of abstraction and its history and pressing beyond the frame of the canvas. Western abstraction has tackled social and political issues before – there was deconstruction in the 1960s, Neo-Geo in the eighties, and most recently the palpable Trump-era uptick. “So it appears” looks to the Global South for perspective.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 2000, The Onion published a durably wise wise-ass book called Our Dumb Century, chronicling with heavy satirical spin the endless follies of the twentieth one. Maybe a sense of relief lifted the editors. They could be forgiven for surmising, mistakenly, that centuries couldn’t get any stupider. That was the year before 9/11, when the world looked improbably rosy. It remains a moment that many look back on with special fondness. But there is dumb nostalgia and there is smart nostalgia. In “1999 NYC Tees,” a bracing four-day exhibition at Fierman on the Lower East Side, painter Nora Griffin zones in on this period and shows that the smart kind lives on the border “between kitsch and pathos.”
Contributed by David Carrier / Raphael Rubinstein, who co-curated “Schema: World as Diagram” at Marlborough with Heather Cause Rubinstein, observes in the catalogue that diagrams are important because they sometimes have much greater explanatory power then words. Rather than tell someone directions, which can be tricky, it might be better to draw a diagram. With work by more than fifty artists on two floors, “Schema” presents an extraordinarily full history of this form, reflecting how a diverse range of artists have collectively created and responded to an aesthetic tradition. Using diagrams, of course, is no guarantee of making sense. Indeed, in its preoccupation with thorough description as opposed to subtle evocation, it might suggest lonely, ruminative souls without audiences. But diagrams can also be a rich way of communicating, and this show focuses on that capacity.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Robert Bordo’s gently enveloping solo exhibition “Paint World,” now on view at Bortolami, is comprehensively seductive and sly, staking a claim to the attention of both the dreamer and the realist. Ultimately, he favors the latter. His subject is this rock we all live on. In depicting it impressionistically, from lunar vantage with small, nuanced brushstrokes, he achieves a paradoxically clued-up serenity of pastoral detachment and soft focus – not unlike that of, say, Monet’s waterlilies or, more abstractly, Günther Förg’s patches and crosshatches. But in literally facing the world, as it were, he also directly confronts its profound challenges and emphatically declines to turn his back on them. Thematically, then, this series escalates the existential worry of his earlier “Windshield” and “Crack-up” paintings – presumably planted in part by Guston, with whom Bordo studied – to global scale.
The best painting-centric guide to art galleries in NYC, Brooklyn, and Queens / Thanks in part to the Canadian wildfires, the hazy days of July are underway. They are perhaps not so lazy, though, as many artists are working full-throttle in the studio, hatching new ideas or preparing for upcoming exhibitions while dragging themselves away to openings at the summer group shows. I know I say it every year, but I love the off-season. Look for a listing update next week.
This month check out Carrie Moyer’s first outing at Alexander Gray since they announced her representation a few weeks ago. On July 21-24, the big Upstate Art Weekend juggernaut takes place, but keep in mind there is art everywhere, year round, all the time, in this thriving arts community. If you want to find out what’s happening among the local artists (I do), check out “The Hills Have Eyes” at LABspace, which will feature a slew of talented artists (both the longterm locals and the transplants, who live in Hillsdale and the surrounding towns. No one curates a livelier group show than Julie Torres and Ellen Letcher. At some point, when I can tear myself away from the studio, I hope to see everyone up there.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Ben Godward is a grounded artist, dedicated for fifteen years to rendering zestful sculptures out of his Bushwick studio by way of poured resins that pop with bright color and radiate social and political awareness.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Nancy Powhida, age 80, has just had her first solo exhibition in New York, curated by Kristen Jensen at Essex Flowers. Titled a deceptively straightforward “Oh Dear! Our Life was Like a Horror Show! (No Wonder You Had to Learn to be Resourceful),” the show comprised six graphite drawings and one oil painting, each piece an unnervingly moving revelation.
The pimple that showed up on Bernard’s chin felt like a small volcano. Google said squeezing it would only drive the bacteria deeper into the epidermis, so he left it alone. “What’s that thing on your face?” Anne Lavelle asked the minute he walked into the gallery.
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
