An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 30, 2026
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Until viewing the concurrent exhibitions up now – one at Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston, the other at Ghostmachine in New York – the last time saw I so many of Jodie Manasevit’s fine, fierce paintings was at the start of 2020, in a previous incarnation of artist-curator David Dixon’s Cathouse Proper project space in Carroll Gardens.
Contributed by Mark Wethli / Technical drawing – the kind we see in plans, elevations, and orthogonal perspectives – is not the obvious choice to explore feelings of isolation, sadness, or loss. For over a century, the painterly gesture has been the primary signifier of these emotions, while drafting has been the province of the designer and the engineer. Given this disparity, Tom Butler’s choice of this medium, in his show “I Became a Room” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, is a surprising one; not for its own sake but the result of a creative process that transforms the art of technical drawing in unexpected and meaningful ways.
Contributed by David Carrier / Five smallish early Jo Baer paintings are on display in one white- walled gallery at DIA Beacon in her exhibition there since 2022. The show is both tantalizing and exasperating. In the 1970s, Baer became famous as a minimalist painter. Then she left New York, published a manifesto in 1983 proclaiming “I am no longer an abstract artist,” and changed her style completely.
Contributed by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi / In the 1970s, Jack Whitten developed a unique painting language driven by process and concept and characterized by material experimentation, dense luminosities, and multidimensionality. This exhibition brings together forty works from Whitten’s land- mark Greek Alphabet series, realized in his downtown New York studio between 1975 and 1978. The paintings were on view at DIA Beacon through July 10, 2023.
I’m still in the Hudson River Valley after the opening at John Davis Gallery yesterday. Thanks Martin Bromirski, Maureen Burke, Tracy Helgeson, Chris Quirk, Amy […]
When I recently vacated my summer studio shack at Habitat For Artists, Simon Draper, creator/curator of the unusual HFA residency project in Beacon, NY, asked […]
NY Times critic Holland Cotter made the trip up the Hudson this week to visit Dia: Beacon and reports that he has no problem with […]
In July issue of The Brooklyn Rail, I wrote about an Imi Knoebel installation at Dia:Beacon. The installation, billed as a restoration of Knoebel’s 1977 […]
In the July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail, check out my article about Imi Knoebel’s 1977 installation, which, thanks to generous funding from Gucci, has […]
This essay, which examines the evolving studio needs and expectations among contemporary artists, originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.——- Contributed […]
