Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 27, 2023
Contributed by Sharon Butler / To understand Elisabeth Condon’s paintings, it seems important to know that she grew up in California in a highly decorated house where she spent hours staring at the wild patterns of the fabrics and wallpapers. The experience certainly informs her exuberant paintings, in which pattern, flower, landscape all co-exist, as she says in her artist statement, in living, breathing presence.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Lauren Luloff’s rigorous new paintings, on view at Fridman Gallery through July 24, have taken a decisive turn away from organic form, floral patterns, and flowing structure towards compulsive geometric pattern.
The principal of our junior high school was a felon. His name was Mr. Phillips. He was a short man – as short as we were – with a large head of thick hair and dark-rimmed glasses. We called him “Froggy” behind his back. The cops arrested him in a motel parking lot holding up a prostitute at gunpoint. The story made the front page of all the local papers. They said the gun wasn’t loaded, but he was. People talked about it for weeks, maybe longer. Everyone was astonished that Mr. Phillips had signed his real name in the motel register. For this they called him an idiot.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has subtly set aside received truths about abstract painting, engaging it as a philosophical subject consisting of things which, regardless of differences of form and content, have been assigned the same classification.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “Plus,”Geoffrey Chadsey’s inventively grotesque show of drawings at Jack Shainman Gallery, the men are endlessly customizable, like sets of Mr. Potato Heads, but with dad bods instead of plastic blobs.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In his beguiling new show of abstract paintings, drawings, and collages at Frosch & Co., Robert Yoder elegantly demonstrates a truth of late modern art: that an object found and isolated, or visual representation shorn of context, is no more derivative or inferior than a given moment in time is subordinate to one that preceded or followed it. What makes it original is the artist’s unique choices in presenting it to the world – and, by implication, the singular experiences and insights that informed them.
The explosion of impressive exhibitions in the Hudson Valley region continues. New galleries include Analog Diary in Beacon, a joint project between several NYC galleries, and Turley Gallery, which opened in Hudson.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / For the past week I’ve been holed up in my apartment with Covid, so I may not make it to your opening tonight. No need to send condolences — at this point it’s just a case of the sniffles and I’ve enjoyed hanging around the house. I’ll be back out in a day or two, bike riding around town and (once an academic always an academic) spending long, lazy days in the studio. There are a lot of good exhibitions to see this month including …
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Full of bright and brimming lines and shapes, jumbled with quirky geometric forms and zippy colors, Gary Petersen’s paintings are giddy and uplifting. They bring to mind all manner of fun – vacation, travel, cartoons, toys, television, Creamsicles, candies, fruit slices and braided rag rugs, the flamboyant bills of toucans and pelicans. More deeply, his large abstract paintings exude a retro, utopian vibe that marries the hard-edge abstraction of late modernism with some of the quirkier strains of twentieth-century design.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The revised exhibition, at the Museum of fine Arts in Boston, with 73 paintings and 23 drawings, is a team effort mounted by the museum’s two curators, two guest curators, various museum staff and educators, the critic Homi Bhabha, and a trauma counselor who crafted a statement about “emotional preparedness” for the show. It begins: “The content of this exhibition is challenging. The Museum offers these words in a spirit of care and invitation.” Midway through the exhibition, visitors who find the material too disturbing can leave through a special exit before they encounter particularly vivid Klan imagery.
Two Coats Obituaries
A favorite @rico_gatson painting. His expansive and energetic solo show, “Spectral Visions,” is on view @miles.mcenery.gallery through Jan 28. Eye popping color.
“The concentric circle motif throughout his work recalls targets, tracking a history of violence and resistance. The mirroring elements allude to islands in space, or to keyholes. And the ensemble of Totems, what Gatson calls panel paintings, embrace the patterned social and ritual information communicated through textile traditions, such as kente.”
#ricogatson #geometricabstraction #contemporarypainting #bushwickartist #milesmcenerygallery #kente
Looking good: @michelearaujo2157 “The Vulnerable Paintings” opens at OSMOS ADDRESS tonight #michelearaujo #50 East 1st nyc #eastvillagegalleries #osmosaddress #thevulnerablepaintings #contemporarypainting
Latest post, link in profile / Siobhan McBride’s canny intimacy / Contributed by Peter Malone / “Long story short” could describe many an art review, but here it is also the name of one of a growing number of pocket galleries along the section of Henry Street beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Long Story Short NYC recently hosted an exhibition of a dozen of Siobhan McBride’s small but compelling paintings, titled “Always Means Never Not” and curated by Stavroula Coulianidis. Well-crafted, understated, and intriguingly disruptive, the small panels are worlds unto themselves, each offering just enough visual information to yield a distinctive sense of time and place. Link in profile.
#siobhanmcsweeney #longstoryshortnyc #petermalone #contemporarypainting
UPDATE: The PODCAST is out 💥Link in profile. Thanks to everyone who tuned in to listen to the live recording yesterday. Part 2 is in the works.
“On Being Not-Nice in the Art World” / We are recording our next podcast episode live on the @clubhouse app, Monday, January 23, 2023, at noon. Link in profile.
Hosted by Adam Simon and Laurie Fendrich, moderated by Sharon Butler. Are contemporary artists and critics too nice about the work being made today? In an era of community-building, gratitude, and identity politics what has happened to honest opinions, harsh critique, and the scathing review?
#twocoatsconversation #artisttalk #artreviews #publiccomments #artpodcast
Latest post, link in profile/ Jeff Gabel: Subtext rules this fucker / Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine, annoyed by the knowing ellipticality of a New Yorker cartoon caption, marches into the august magazine’s offices and confronts the editor – portrayed to preppy-geek perfection by the late Edward Herrmann – about its meaning. After offering several generic, pretentious, and abjectly unconvincing interpretations, he admits that he has no idea what the hell the caption is supposed to mean. Jeff Gabel – whose elaborately narrated drawings and paintings, a few site-specific, are presently on display in a solo at Spencer Brownstone Gallery on the Lower East Side and a group show at Jennifer Baahng Gallery on the Upper East Side – runs no such risk, abjuring obscure glibness for mordantly wise, sourly penetrating bloviation. Link in profile.
#jeffgabel @spencerbrownstonegallery #textbasedart #cartoons #seinfeld
