Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s refreshing and a little humbling to walk into a gallery and be blitzed by art that’s cleverly derived from years of play, probing, and practice. Rick Briggs’s solo show at Satchel Projects shows us how open-ended and liberating painting can be.
Tag: Jack Tworkov
Robert Moskowitz’s visual quartet
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / One thought I had upon seeing Robert Moskowitz: Paintings and Drawings from Four Decades at Peter Freeman Inc. was that I could’ve been satisfied to encounter only the large wall of drawings. Arranged loosely yet thoughtfully, in a reconstruction of a wall from the artist’s studio, over sixty works of mostly oil or pastel on paper hang with a kind of majestic poise, each pinned by two thumbtacks in the top corners. Every drawing a vertical, together they present our city: here the finely ridged silhouette of the Empire State Building, there the graceful curve of the Flatiron Building, and, most engrossingly, the dense parallel bars of the World Trade Center from another lifetime ago. Pared down to their essential shapes, the buildings stand resolute in all seasons and moods, whether blue on blue or gray on fleshy pink or black on emerald. Occasionally a hazy ray of moonlight catches a cloud, a hint of atmosphere wafts nearby, or active fingerprints swarm across the paper. These quieter moments play off hard edges in a way that evokes walking home alone after a night out with friends, when New York is at its most still and you feel a flutter of wonder to live in it. What I mean to say is, the wall is a love song to the city.
Janice Biala’s epochal studio
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A striking feature of the paintings and works on paper of Janice Biala (1903–2000), now on view at Berry Campbell in a show craftily curated by Jason Andrew, is their seamless reconciliation of civilizational clutter and spatial order. Fixing that notion is the earliest painting, The Studio (1946), arraying the artist’s active workspace and establishing her intent to embrace the world through it. (Coincidentally, Vera Iliatova’s “The Drawing Room” at Nathalie Karg gamely recaptures and updates kindred impulses.) Biala’s work here, spanning the immediate postwar period almost to the end of the Cold War and blending the New York School and the School of Paris – she lived in both cities – also bears the considerable weight of twentieth-century history, art and otherwise, with extraordinary grace and weightless cohesion, free of the strain of obvious contrivance.
Jack Tworkov: Laying down line
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In the 1960s, Jack Tworkov began to feel as if he had taken Ab-Ex gestural abstraction as far as it […]
Abstract Expressionist New York: Line and legacy
Adolph Gottlieb (American, 1903-1974), “Blast, I,” 1957, oil on canvas, 7′ 6″ x 45 1/8.” The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Philip Johnson Fund […]
Tworkov’s first comprehensive NYC survey opens this week
Jack Tworkov in his Provincetown studio. Photo by � Arnold Newman, for an article written by Robert Hatch, “At The Tip Of Cape Cod,” July […]
Painter Mira Schor edits a collection of Jack Tworkov’s writing
I wrote another guest post for Art21 last week about Jack Tworkov’s new collection of writing. I’m just getting around to posting it on Two […]
Janice Biala retrospective at Tibor de Nagy
“Biala: I belong where my easel is…” Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, NY. Through Jan. 5. Janice Biala (1903-2000), Jack Tworkov‘s kid sister, lived […]





















