Tag: Elizabeth Murray

Solo Shows

Karin Davie: Totally tubular

Contributed by Amanda Church / Conjuring The Cure’s 1987 song Just Like Heaven – which proclaims “you’re just like a dream” – Karin Davie’s eight new large-scale paintings on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, all oil on linen, transport us to a realm of sensation and association. Here her wavy imagery, which she has been developing in one form or another since the 1990s, immediately evokes the swells and dips of the ocean’s surface as well as recalling the fluid lines essential to the work of painters like Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Bridget Riley, Moira Dryer, and late de Kooning, albeit to varying effect.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Meg Lipke’s supple resistance

Contributed by Lawre Stone / Meg Lipke makes enormity relatable. The immense Slanting Grid welcomes visitors to her exhibition “Matrilines” at Broadway Gallery. Monumental in scale, soft in countenance, this 8 x 16-foot work of painted and stitched fiber-filled muslin rises above the viewer, floating grandly along one of the gallery’s longest walls.

Continue Reading →
Group Shows

Art history diagrammed at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

Contributed by David Carrier / Anyone old enough to remember Claude Levi-Strauss’s books on structural anthropology or Rosalind Krauss’ famed structuralist account of sculpture, all richly suggestive sources of art theory, will likely appreciate “Building Models: The Shape of Painting,” currently up at the The Milton Resnick and Pat Passolf Foundation and curated by Saul Ostrow. The central question he poses is how you construct a painting. In the 1960s and 1970s, when painting was beleaguered and political experimentation was a related concern, tribes of New York artists were consumed with answering that question.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Susan Rothenberg: The way things can’t be

Contributed by Jason Andrew / Susan Rothenberg’s exhibition “The Weather,” now up at Hauser & Wirth, is a rare chance to experience the breadth and intensity of one of most vital influences in American painting. The exhibition gathers fourteen works from across her career – horses, fragmented bodies, and spectral forms – some rarely or never before exhibited. Rothenberg told the LA Times in 1983 that she liked to think of the subjects in her paintings as being “swept along in unconfined space by forces of weather” – rendered in thermal swirls and blizzardy brush marks – and the exhibition is structured around this idea. 

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

JoAnne Carson: Raucous retro-futurism

Contributed by Mary Jones / Exuberance is a word frequently used in describing the work of JoAnne Carson, and, in “Cosmic Chatter,” her first solo show at DC Moore, it’s in hyperdrive. Twelve large, colorful paintings share the main gallery space with one eight-by-six-foot monochromatic sculpture of an intricately crafted white flowering tree. Placed near the entrance, the sculpture serves as a three-dimensional model and introduction to the paintings. The fragile delicacy of this surprising and marvelous object resembles an encounter with a conjured specimen preserved in ice, a fact among fiction. 

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Daisy Sheff: The anatomy of fairy tales

Contributed by Jason Andrew / Daisy Sheff’s exhibition “Begun in the Dazzling Sunshine” at Parker Gallery’s new space on Melrose in Los Angeles, intertwines reality with the fantastical. Her paintings employ leaping animals, fussy architectures, and bright flora to explain narratives that tease the peculiar logic of fairy tales. Their uneven surfaces, cleverly devised characters, and woolly layered scenes are busy and unwieldy. To interpret them is like piecing together the plot of a really great dream.

Continue Reading →
Drawing

Elizabeth Murray’s wildly imaginative, electrified mind

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Like a car with its engine left running, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) seemed poised to dart in any direction on short notice. On view at Gladstone 64, Drawings (1974-2006), curated by Kathy Halbreich, boasts over 60 works of mostly pen, marker, and/or colored pencil on notebook-size paper (and actual notebook paper). Several are studies for larger works, others are on pages ripped from a binding, most all are imbued with a casualness but also intention. This show offers an enchanting glimpse into Murray’s wildly imaginative, electrified mind. I dare you to see it and not smile.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Elizabeth Murray in Buffalo and for the ages

Contributed by Dana Tyrrell / From 1965 to 1967, Elizabeth Murray a towering presence in contemporary painting who died in 2007 lived and worked in Buffalo, New York. Having moved from San Francisco to teach at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen College), she used her time in Buffalo to build up to living and working in New York City. Elizabeth Murray: Back In Town, Anderson Gallery at the University at Buffalo, demonstrated that this interlude was formative to the canonically understood Elizabeth Murray.

Continue Reading →