Tag: Cecily Brown

Group Shows

Immersion at Fugue Gallery

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / At first, Fugue Gallery’s new Chinatown space seems like an apartment gallery or DIY space: the walls are brick, the windows are curtained, soft music plays on speakers, a few paintings and photographs hang on the wall. The works by the 16 artists in the inaugural show “Forbidden Fruit” are strong. The first to catch my eye was Justin Wood, an oil painter enamored with academic painting, chiaroscuro, and Baroque still lifes. His Purple Grapes recalls Rachel Ruysch’s work, rendered with immaculate technique. Rotting Apple, referential to Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, expands upon his adoration for art history with perfect paint application. Alexa Huang’s Rehearsal for a Forgotten Tableau is pastoral and open, its paint handling not unlike Cecily Brown’s and its palette like that of a Tiepolo. Vincent Sachtler’s Comarum palustre is firmly contemporary – a mesmerizing moving light à la Dan Flavin and Olafur Eliasson.

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Solo Shows

Camilla Fallon: Womanizer

Contributed by Amanda Church / Following the fleshy path of Rubens, Lucian Freud, Joan Semmel, and Cecily Brown, among many others, Camilla Fallon has recently focused her loose, lush brushwork on the female body’s midsection, specifically the navel. “The Navel Is the Center,” her current show at The Painting Center, consists of eight medium-scale paintings and four very small ones, most providing an intimate view of this inverted body part. Under such close scrutiny, it becomes symbolic, implying vulnerability, contemplation, and introspection. 

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Group Shows

3 painters at Zepster Gallery

Contributed by Riad Miah / After graduating from Pratt and spending a few years staging and curating pop-up shows and one-night events, Devon Gordon opened the ambitious new Zepster Gallery in Bushwick last May. The title of its second exhibition, now up, is “Oh, To Leave a Trace,” after a chapter of Mary Gabriel’s acclaimed book Ninth Street Women. The show features three female artists whose work continues in the contemplatively feminist vein that the book frames. 

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Museum Exhibitions

What makes a good painting?

Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.

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