An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Saturday, December 20, 2025
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / As “Ass Backwards,” the title of David Humphrey’s new show of paintings at Fredericks & Freiser, suggests, they are less in-your-face than much of his recent work. But they remain as busy, visually precise, and narratively provocative as ever, suggesting that it is not Humphrey’s approach to painting but rather his apprehension of the world and his place in it that have changed.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / This is a little late, but just in time for the Oscars. Filmmaking in the time of Covid is looking healthy, so no epochal disquisition is needed – just the usual caveat that these picks are inevitably subjective and, in some cases, perhaps eccentric.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine, annoyed by the knowing ellipticality of a New Yorker cartoon caption, marches into the august magazine’s offices and confronts the editor – portrayed to preppy-geek perfection by the late Edward Herrmann – about its meaning. After offering several generic, pretentious, and abjectly unconvincing interpretations, he admits that he has no idea what the hell the caption is supposed to mean. Jeff Gabel – whose elaborately narrated drawings and paintings, a few site-specific, are presently on display in a solo at Spencer Brownstone Gallery on the Lower East Side and a group show at Jennifer Baahng Gallery on the Upper East Side – runs no such risk, abjuring obscure glibness for mordantly wise, sourly penetrating bloviation.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / On one level, in “Flex, Rot, and Sp(l)it,” a penetrating and conceptually cohesive show of paintings at Nathalie Karg Gallery, Heidi Hahn visually chronicles the tension between the unavoidable confinement of the body and the irrepressible expansiveness of the mind. While the so-called mind-body problem is as old as philosophy itself, to Western audiences it is perhaps most resonant in René Descartes’ exercise of systematic doubt, concluding with “I think therefore I am.” In terms of value, this ingrained formulation privileges the mind over the body. While philosophers are left to connect mental processes with gray matter, for painters and others it can be discomfiting to realize that although thinking is supposed to be the essence of being, a person’s mind is often prejudged on the basis of their body’s characteristics.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin is darkly comic — invariably mordant and occasionally hilarious. But the situational modesty and outward sardonicism are subterfuge. This is a stealthily grand film with weighty political and existential themes, framing McDonagh as contemporary cinema’s wisest bad-ass.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Dream Opera,” Mary Shah’s solo show at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea, presents suavely dense abstract narratives that still unfailingly meet the visual priority of beauty. While the notion of an abstract narrative may seem paradoxical by its terms, if representation and abstraction are part of a continuum and not a stark dichotomy, the paradox isn’t too daunting to resolve. Abstract Expressionism, spiritual abstraction, and lyrical abstraction have long certified emotional and spiritual content in abstract painting, and opened the door to narrative as well. Shah confidently marches through it, and in fine style.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In enlisting the stretcher itself and other materials not customarily used in art as part of a painting’s aesthetic content […]
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Tom Bills, for decades primarily a large-scale sculptor, has recently translated that vocation into riveting compact-yet-monumental wall-mounted pieces now on display at 57W57 Arts in midtown Manhattan. Rectangles of modest size, their highly wrought finishes and elliptical narratives invest them with an improbably kinetic presence and stern gravitas that leave the viewer both sobered and assured.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / While a degree of pandemic fatigue is understandable, there’s no denying that lockdown was an extraordinary fact of daily life whose ripple effects have far from dissipated. And insofar as it left artists with more time to think and work, it has yielded an abundance of resonant art. Jillian McDonald’s and Kate Teale’s drawings, now on view at Undercurrent Gallery in Dumbo, are sterling examples.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In his beguiling new show of abstract paintings, drawings, and collages at Frosch & Co., Robert Yoder elegantly demonstrates a truth of late modern art: that an object found and isolated, or visual representation shorn of context, is no more derivative or inferior than a given moment in time is subordinate to one that preceded or followed it. What makes it original is the artist’s unique choices in presenting it to the world – and, by implication, the singular experiences and insights that informed them.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / As the title “Blue Italian Skies Above” suggests, walking into the exhibition of Edith Schloss’s paintings now at Alexandre Gallery produces a kind of pastoral contentment. But don’t be fooled into thinking she was a shallow, acquiescent Pollyanna. Lurking in that casual lightness is a distinct quality of mortality and limitation.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When an arthouse revisionist western directed by an Australian woman and starring an Englishman dominates the Oscar nominations, it’s safe to say that the pandemic has not severely compromised the quality or vision of cinema, even if it has skewed the structure of the business towards streaming platforms and away from brick-and-mortar theaters.With the usual caveats about inevitable bias and subjectivity, here, in alphabetical order, is a defensible Top Ten for 2021.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / When the Minimalists were casting paintings as nothing more than value-free objects in the world and the Pop Artists were knocking them off their elitist pedestal, Vincent Smith (1929-2003) was stalwartly maintaining his belief in the form as a conveyor of social reality and, beyond that, an instrument of political assertion. With great substantive range and technical facility, he invested his throat-grabbingly expressionistic paintings of the urban vistas and signature characters of Harlem and Brooklyn — sixteen now on display at Alexandre Gallery on the Lower East Side — with the brimming emotion of the African American nation. He made the work in this exhibition between 1954 and 1972, so the varied subject-matter is perhaps expected. More remarkable is the potent through-line of his vision.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A clear strain in American letters celebrates the capacity of insouciant and unabashedly disreputable people to say things that matter by cutting through the flatulent smog that tends to enshroud orthodoxies. The Lost Generation had Ernest Hemingway, and Baby Boomers had Hunter S. Thompson and Dave Hickey, who passed away in November at 82. These guys particularly Thompson but undeniably Hemingway and Hickey as well showcased their disdain for convention and their embrace of the drunken and the stoned, the naughty and the down-and-out. But all three were dead serious about life and death, and that emerged in their work.
Restricted to her studio during lockdown and cut off from large spaces in which to create site-specific work, Lisa Hoke felt the need to fashion pieces that were more portable and more presumptively permanent. What resulted is a scintillating revelation.
