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 […]
Tag: abstract painting
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Artist of Everything
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
Adam Henry: Full spectrum
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 […]
Medrie MacPhee, David Humphrey, and the power of recognition
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 […]
Between object and metaphor: Berger, Lled�s, and Uchiyama
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 […]
Fast, unfussy, bright: An interview with Meghan Brady
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 […]
What good is abstract painting now?
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Without any bombs exploding or even a single shot fired, the world we knew before COVID has gone �poof.� Sure, buildings are intact; trees, grass and flowers still grow; the sky is blue; people walk on streets and drive cars. What�s disappeared, for who knows […]
Assistants: Connected through circumstance
Contributed by Adam Simon / Lineage is not a concept with a lot of currency these days; too close, perhaps, to its more d�class� kissing cousin, tradition. We look to academia and art history to find precursors for artistic innovators. Typically, the presentation and criticism of art tend to focus […]
Thomas Berding: Something wild
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Thomas Berding�s insouciant show �Field Test,� at The Painting Center in Chelsea, is a smart, spirited consideration of the tension between the whirl and the pastoral. The seven paintings � and their witty titles � are straightforward enough to impart primary messages clearly, but that leaves […]
Catalogue essay: Jennifer Riley�s Machine Series Paintings
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When Brooklyn artist Jennifer Riley began making large-scale abstract paintings using discarded laser-cut pieces of steel, she connected with a century of artists preoccupied with the deconstructed machine. They ranged from post-World War I Dadaists like Raoul Hausmann and Francis Picabia whose images of humans […]
