Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Join us on Sunday, February 8 at 2 pm for a lively conversation with abstract painters Sharon Butler, Wendy Fulenwider Liszt, and Ariel Mitchell as part of our exhibition Street Corner Conversations. Seating is limited, and refreshments will be served.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Consider the hunk as a deliberate, usable form, as Julia Rommel does. Her paintings are hunks of color painted on linen – cut up, unstretched, and stapled into off-the-air color TV bars. They are as much about labor as color. Each painting feels as though it was sledgehammered into the wall just before you walked in the room, still ringing from the strike. Flanking Rommel through the show is Lucas Blalock, photographer. His photos operate similarly, offering an easy, even fun, seduction that segues into discovery as you find out how he’s tricked you. Images are cut and layered over one another, details are hidden. The viewer is rewarded for close, patient attention, as in an I Spy book.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Hedda Sterne was the only woman made famous by Nina Leen’s photograph The Irascibles for Life magazine in 1951, and the group’s last surviving member when she died at 100 in 2011. While many of those featured in that iconic photograph achieved mythic status, Sterne was consigned to the margins of art history. “I am known more for that darn photo, than for 80 years of work,” she once remarked. Implausibly inventive and unwilling to adhere to a single style nor embrace prevailing aesthetic trends, Sterne didn’t cast herself in the heroic mold favored by the brooding boys associated with Abstract Expressionism.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Anne Russinof passed away a year ago at the age of 68. “Gestural Symphony” is a commanding memorial retrospective of her mostly large, emphatically gestural paintings. Posthumous exhibitions are by nature bittersweet, but Russinof’s resists melancholy because her work is so irrepressibly lively. Her signature outsize curves are sweeping and springy. They kick, bounce, and jump around.
Contributed by Talia Shiroma / The drawings in Trisha Donnelly’s show at the Drawing Center are a succession of curving volumes with meticulous shading, depicting what are most aptly called not objects but “things.” They suggest sinew and bone, heavy metal aesthetics, and the errant, automatic doodling found on classroom desks or tucked away in notebooks. Neither representational nor abstract, some recall Jay DeFeo’s works from the seventies in their effects of translucency and particularized strangeness. Yet unlike DeFeo’s apparitional tripods and dental bridge, the things which Donnelly depicts rarely seem to coincide with physical reality, to mystifying and sometimes numinous effect.
Contributed by Bill Arning / In the mid-1980s, great art experiences of every conceivable stripe seemed to bloom prodigiously and organically from a single club on Avenue A called the Pyramid. Out of this dark, sticky-floored dive came a motley congregation of artists, musicians, drag queens, filmmakers, and poets who launched shockingly original cultural provocations that still reverberate globally, even though relatively few people witnessed them at the time.
Contributed by Jonathan Agin / Formed by erosion over millions of years, Chaco Canyon was the site of the Ancestral Puebloan people’s sprawling urban center. Buildings erected there in the eleventh century were among the tallest in North America until the nineteenth. These remote, enigmatic ruins, marked on early Spanish maps, were rediscovered in the modern era by US Army surveyors after the Mexican-American War. Today they are part of the Navajo Nation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. When Anne Wehrley Björk was a child, her family used to take her camping there. As demonstrated in “Lost Canyon,” her new show of paintings at Margot Samel, she has never forgotten the landscape.
Contributed by Adam Simon / A photographer friend once asked me why painters are always talking about the space in a painting. He wanted to know what this term “space” meant. I talked about the different ways paint on a flat surface could be made to suggest depth, and how the challenge for modern painters was to create depth while also reaffirming the flatness of the support. I probably referred to the elusive concept of the “picture plane” and how simultaneously maintaining mutually exclusive ideas – flatness and depth – could produce a poetic or even a mystical dimension in visual art. Most abstract paintings present shallow space, keeping depth to a minimum. This type of painting is usually non-hierarchical; nothing feels more essential than anything else. The viewer’s eye tends to scan. If you want to both represent depth and reaffirm flatness, shallow space is going to be easier to handle than deep space.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Peter Plagens’ bracing new abstract paintings don’t so much as invite you in as dare you not to enter. Each canvas consists of three basic components: a painted frame of washy gray or brown; a pristinely rendered hard-edge shape, assertively opaque, centrally positioned, vertically symmetrical, and horizontally striated; and scattered, seemingly directional slashes. The second feature propels the paintings, but the other two steer them. The distinctly dilute vagueness of the frames might impart risk, the pesky shards impulse, and the vivid, intuitively color-coded ramps expansive fate – humble versions of Jacob’s Ladder, vouchsafing a future that need not be feared, at least distantly echoing one of Dave Hickey’s blithely peremptory and eminently arguable mantras: “Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.”
Contributed by Joe Fyfe / A large souvenir brochure accompanied Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” tour in the late 1980s. It included, among an assortment of photographs of him and reproductions of his sketches, a thousand-word essay titled “How To Speak Poetry” that has had a second life on the internet. In this singular artistic manifesto, Cohen admonishes singers that they are “among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside.” On the next page, he tells them to “think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report.” If an audience appreciates the event, “it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.” Su-Mei Tse’s current exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery seems to freshly embody Cohen’s abiding concern with presentation and how an artist must address an audience.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Before going to see “The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York” at the Met, I did not know a Native American artist had been part of the Abstract Expressionist movement. The 35 works in this exhibition include paintings and drawings made during Morrison’s two stints in New York – the first in the late 1940s, when he was in his early twenties, the second in the mid-1950s – along with paintings from his 1980s Horizon Series. The best paintings come from the artist’s New York years, when he was committed to full abstraction.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / A painter I once knew – a highly regarded abstractionist, modernist, and lover of Matisse as well as a popular professor – praised the work of a student during a critique. One of his colleagues, a postmodernist painter not so well regarded, said dismissively, “I don’t know, all I see are some colors on canvas.” The first painter replied hotly, “What the hell do you think painting is all about?” Another time, I invited a painter, now sadly sidelined, to join me at a survey of contemporary abstraction. There was a pregnant pause, “To see what exactly, Michael … shapes?” Many remain skeptical about the relevance, meaning, and remaining potential of manipulating shapes and colors. But Jane Haimes is still fruitfully exploring the possibilities. She understands that as long as there is painting, there will be shapes and colors, so we ought to make something of them.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / As we orbit Winter Solstice, marking the shortest days, longest nights, and coldest temperatures of the year, along comes the perfectly timed exhibition, “Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination” at Springs Projects in Dumbo. The show, which presents the work of multimedia artists Donna Dennis and Tommy Hartung, is dark, atmospheric, and hauntingly beautiful, evoking the season’s long shadows, monochrome palette, and stark beauty.
Contributed by David Carrier / Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654) has been much celebrated for two generations, in a now vast critical literature. And she has had numerous museum shows, some large. Both the intrinsic quality of her paintings and her difficult and extraordinary life as a female Italian artist warrant the praise and attention are warranted. How then could the Columbus Museum of Art, which owns just one Gentileschi – Bathsheba (1635–37) – duly highlight her achievement in its current exhibition “Artemeisia Gentileschi: Naples to Beirut”? The story is remarkable.
Last Artist Standing, Sharon Louden’s compelling new anthology, features essays by a selection of artists who have managed to pass 50 and still make art. Such persistence and durability are especially impressive considering that many of their art school pals have given up the studio and resigned themselves to “real jobs” as building contractors, real estate agents, lawyers, psychotherapists, librarians, and more…,
Contributed by Nathan Storey / James Horner: Making of an American Dandy at Amos Eno Gallery looks back across forty years of the artist’s life and practice without tidying the record. The works in the retrospective are bruised and glamorous, horny and grieving, and above all, alive.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Because of you, Two Coats of Paint will continue to thrive in 2026. Your contributions will enable us to continue producing these painting-centric monthly gallery guides that help the painting community discover exhibitions in New York City, the Hudson Valley, and beyond. Cheers to another year of great art, great writing, and great community, despite the dark days ahead….
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Invitations, dates, details — McBride/Dillman, CLEA RSKY, 68 Prince Street Gallery in Kingston, the first Open Studio of 2026. This piece was originally published in Sharon Butler Notebooks on Substack.
Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / True to its title, the group show “Precisely.” at Flinn Gallery is chockablock with precision-crafted paintings. There is an equal […]
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Happy New Year! January is a quieter month in the Hudson Valley, but there is still plenty of great art to see around the region. From north to south, Barbara Todd: Undoings opens at Opalka Gallery in Albany on January 20. Three solo shows open at Catskill Art Space in Livingston Manor on January 17: Richard Barlow, Lisa Craft and Ellen Driscoll. Yura Adams’ solo exhibition Marvel’s Cabinet opens at WAAM in Woodstock on January 23. At the Millbrook Library The Color of Growth with Irja Bodén, JoAnne Lobotsky, Patrick Neal, and Colin O’Con opens on January 9, and on January 10, a two person show with Susan English and Laura Moriarty opens at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, CT and CRAZY, a group show curated by Jaime Ransome opens at BAU in Beacon. Also on January 10, Boundaries: Beth Dary, Amy Kupferberg, Rita Maas, and Mary Negro opens at Yellow Studio in Cross River, NY.
