Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Monday, March 20, 2023
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Just about every piece in Nicole Eisenman�s nobly minatory exhibition �Al-ugh-ories� at the New Museum, up through June 26, pulses with aesthetic energy, turbocharged by a peripatetic erudition that darts assuredly from one caustic historical (sometimes art-historical) reference point to another. The artist is centrally, […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Victor Kanefsky�s effervescent documentary Art Bastard casts 76-year old New York painter Robert Cenedella as a kind of aesthetic Robin Hood who robs from hallowed art tradition to give ordinary people bravura paintings that don�t require them to plumb art history or some other arcane […]
Two Coats of Paint is an NYC-based art project, that includes an award-winning art blogazine, artists residency, social media services, conversations, catalogue essays for painters, and other special initiatives. In 2022, Two Coats of Paint started a new online publication, Obituaries & Remembrances, to publish artists obituaries and commemorate artists […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Artists� instrumentalization of their children in their work intuitively seems to breach the parental duty of protection, and to exploit their youth at the risk of maladjustment. Sally Mann�s infamously risqu� deployment of her sometimes naked children in her photographs is well short of pedophilic, […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Luminous, though an overused adjective in art writing, is an apt one for Amy Lincoln�s edgy new paintings, mainly of plants, on display at Morgan Lehman in Chelsea. Their vivid color, exacting line, and exotic detail leap out at the viewer, so that the initial […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Russian director Alexander Sokurov�s Francofonia is a strange and intriguing film � a kind of avant-garde point-of-view documentary. Do not mistake the title for �Francophilia.� With considerable snideness and mockery � including magical realist interventions by a fatuous Napoleon, sardonic intonements of �libert�, egalit�, faternit�,� […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Like VOLTA, the Art on Paper fair on Pier 36 was a modestly gauged and user-friendly alternative to the massive and unwieldy Armory Fair. It also presented consistently rich work from a geographically and stylistically broad range of galleries. Here are a few eye-catching selections. […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Given the demonstrated capability, energy, and ambition of Bushwick artist, gallerist, and all-purpose cultural maven Paul D�Agostino, that he would invent his own visual alphabet � as he has for his new show of paintings �Scriptive Formalities� at Life on Mars � isn�t surprising. A […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Michael Mann�s brilliant 1981 neo-noir film Thief � showing in BAM�s February 5-16 Mann retrospective � is paradoxically celebrated for being under-appreciated. Substantively, he makes the one-last-score storyline as ugly-funny as good Tarantino and as tragic as good Polanski, brings out James Caan�s bestial, foulmouthed […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Fred Valentine made his wryly haunting charcoal chiaroscuro drawings of real people �some sweet and tender others damaged and horrific� � on view in “The Pumpkin Festival and other portraits” at Schema Projects in Bushwick � in the early 1990s. That was when Kurt Cobain […]
Two Coats Obituaries