Tag: Egon Schiele

Group Shows

Summoning, Conjuring, Coaxing: A trend emerges in Bushwick

Contributed by Lucas Moran / Maybe death isn’t final but simply a door leading into another room. That feeling ran through “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” an excellent group show at Active Space in Bushwick curated by Patrick Bower and Robert Zurer of Immaterial Projects. It tapped into whatever lies just beyond perception: the subconscious, the occult, the spirits, the talismans, the circus freaks. Everything half-seen or half-remembered was allowed to take shape. If contemporary painting has drifted away from figuration and identity, this show suggested we may be heading towards something more concealed – art that conjures rather than describes, call it hiddenist painting, embracing what is buried, invisible, or occulted, where death, memory, and imagination loop into one.

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Solo Shows

Shirin Mirjamali’s exquisite intensity

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Iranian government has looked askance at political assertiveness and social progressivism since the revolution of 1979. The pressure under which women operate is especially heavy. Political protest, however, cannot be a way of life. Day to day, Iranians are compelled to avoid confrontations that could place them in jeopardy, discreetly acknowledging anguish and resolving to sublimate it. Shirin Mirjamali, whose exquisitely intense works on paper are now on display in her solo show “Hidden Longing” at Anita Rogers Gallery, exemplifies this essentially pensive disposition.

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Solo Shows

Tom Butler’s emotional twilight zone

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.

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Resident Artist

Ariel Bullion Ecklund, August 3–8 

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Next month, Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Ithaca, NY, artist Ariel Bullion Ecklund. Ecklund creates ceramic objects and photographs that draw from the memories she accumulates as she moves through the world. Universal themes such as absence, impermanence, memory, and yearning inform work that is also deeply personal. For our next resident, our bodies hold memories as much as our minds do. This understanding is the foundation for everything she makes.

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