An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, December 19, 2025
Contributed by Jason Andrew / There is a bound wildness to Liz Ainslie’s new paintings at Deanna Evans Projects. Across 18 paintings, three of which are over six feet tall and the largest she’s made to date, Ainslie introduces an eclectic menagerie of loops, halos, and squiggles penned in by stripes, checkerboards, and color fields. The works are beguiling hybrids of perception and abstraction in their pursuit of free-form reverie with formal discipline.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In an explosion of color and clutter, Marta Lee’s new work, on view at Tappeto Volante in Gowanus, shakes up the revered tradition of still life painting. Lee fills her paintings with the “material archive of her life” – digital clock radios, toys from childhood, record albums, family heirlooms, and pride flags. She plays with how memory and context shape our visual experience, bringing perception into personal life and exploring the accrual of meaning through painting.
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.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Jacqueline Gourevitch’s resilience stems from restraint and slow observation. From her first solo exhibition in 1958 to the current striking survey of 21 cloud paintings dating from 1965–2018 at Storage Gallery in Tribeca, the nonagenarian has shown that sustained attention to a single subject can yield infinite and dynamic variations.
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.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Judith Linhares has a fascination with bad taste, the oh-too beautiful, and the color yellow. In her third solo exhibition at PPOW, she doesn’t hold back packing the gallery with paintings that feature strange figurative archetypes, gaudy décor, and kitschy bits all in an embrace of the subversive potential of visual excess.
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.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s easy to associate the new paintings by Julie Beaufils, now on view at Matthew Brown Gallery in Tribeca, with a post-apocalyptic world. The sixteen paintings suggest fractured architectures and abandoned fields, sun baked and rising from a humming radioactive haze. Beaufils lives and works in Paris, and her precise lines and delineated spaces capture its curving promenades, narrowed boulevards, and sinking perspectives. Travels to Los Angeles and the American Southwest have also influenced this new work.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In her new paintings in “Bloom” at DC Moore Gallery, Theresa Daddezio suggests an ornate elegance structured by a quirky sense of pinball-wizardry. Playful and lighthearted, each of the sixteen paintings in this packed show offers a vibrant world of color and fluid forms, simulating the visual experience of a flashy arcade. The paintings are spatially dense and lyrically conceived. Their all-over purity might tie her work to aesthetic movements like Neo-Plasticism. Indeed, her work, in Mondrian’s terms, expresses the “aesthetically purified” and ignores “the particulars of appearance.” Yet it also embodies a fantasized complexity that affords the paintings a dynamic arc. Daddezio has certainly found her cipher – an algorithm defined by petal-like structures, collaged color gradations, and zig-zagging linear forms.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In her solo show “The Scenic Route” at High Noon, Theresa Hackett remains committed to a process of reimagining nature through abstraction, texture, and bold compositions. Inspired by the dynamic interplay of form and environment, the show echoes the pastoral and sublime themes of classical landscape art – where balance and harmony were paramount – while pushing boundaries with modern kick. Like the early modernist Oscar Bluemner, Hackett’s paintings are – and long have been – architectural distillations of landscapes, structured yet only symbolically realistic.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions.
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.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / With her paintings fetching millions at auction, Shara Hughes has been on a tear. Since 2020, she has had nine solo shows, presenting work from Shanghai to London, Åalborg to Luzern, Aspen to Manhattan. All but three of the 17 paintings in her first show in Los Angeles, titled “Light the Dark” and presently up at David Kordansky Gallery, were made in 2023. Fueling Hughes’s remarkable pace is an unrelenting embrace of paint, with which she balances descriptive and imaginative motifs. Notwithstanding her commercial success, she retains a fearless approach to dismantling conventions, the paintings a cutting edge. As she noted in a 2020 interview, the more she attempts to control the creative direction in her paintings “the worse they are.”
As the Yellow Chair Salon starts its fourth year, we are excited to introduce Symposia!, a six-month intensive virtual program created for artists with an advanced studio practice. It is a rare opportunity to work with some of the leading artists, educators, gallerists, and critics in contemporary art.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Elisa Soliven sees her dignified ceramic sculptures, now on display in a faultlessly curated solo show at LABspace in Hillsdale, as vessels containing the rich stuff of life – space, time, cultural tropes, history both grand and personal. Too eclectic and searching to be merely iconic, they are brimming with both old and new referents, and bear their weight with extraordinary grace.
