Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In the early days of the Covid lockdown, Laura Dana Smith, a former organizer of Bushwick Open Studios, left Brooklyn and moved to Taos, New Mexico. I reached out to learn what Smith’s experience leaving Brooklyn and relocating in Taos has been like.
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.
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 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 Sharon Butler / Jane Swavely has lived and worked in a loft overlooking the Bowery since the 1980s when she was an SVA student and later a studio assistant to Brice Marden. Since “Jinx,” her pre-pandemic solo show at A.I.R. gallery, Jane’s work has become more subtractive, with […]
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Singling out individual works for praise in an exhibition of the size and range of MoMAs Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is almost beside the point. Her first US retrospective in 40 years, it includes 300 of her approximately 1,200 extant works: pencil drawings, gouache
Contributed by Adam Simon / It has been argued that there is no such thing as an abstract painting anymore, only pictures of abstract paintings. What sounds like a slur on abstract painters is simply an acknowledgement that digital technology, social media and the proliferation of images has affected how […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In the 1940s, Philip Guston noted that the problem with figurative art was that it vanishes into recognition. By 1960, he was griping about the conceit that abstract art was autonomous, pure and for itself. The tension implied by these two conflicting but evidently valid […]
Contributed by Karen Schifano / Reacting to the overtly emotional critical response to Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella sought to refine Greenbergian formalism by reducing painting to its value as an object and nothing more. He is famous for saying, �What you see is what you see,� and influenced an entire […]
Contributed by Sangram Majumdar / Recently, I have been admiring the images of Meghan Brady’s large-scale works on paper that she�s been posting on Instagram. The images prompted me to revisit the narrative I had arrived at about her work, and to investigate further. So, on the occasion of her […]
