In the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker reports that Bay Area painter John Wood has the rare knack of making small, busy abstract paintings seem big. “Some strike the eye almost like scaled-down reproductions of themselves. Wood gets a tremendous quotient of gestural energy into his show at the phone-booth-size […]
Tag: Kenneth Baker
John Andrews and Emil Lukas explore the real in San Francisco
In San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker reports that the complexity in Andrews’ work lies in the viewer’s encounter with it. “As sharply defined as each piece appears, its color fluctuates unpredictably with changing vantage points and time of day, none more lushly than the big rose-colored piece designated “08-14” (2008), […]
Frannsen: Visual gibberish or fearless painting?
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker swoons over new work by Southern California painter Sheri� Franssen. “Her paintings may strike unprepared eyes as visual gibberish, but that’s the first proof of her fearlessness as an artist. To comprehend these abstractions, even merely to stay with them, requires moving repeatedly […]
Sarah Walker: Layer upon layer upon layer
In the press release, Sarah Walker claims to use painting “as a tool for perceptual recalibration that enables viewers to detect and intuit disparate spatial systems simultaneously.” Well, OK, I guess so, but no need to be so rhetorically oblique and cerebral. Her mostly small, densely-layered compositions incorporate lattice-like structures, […]
David Park: Sidelong awareness, immune to the skepticism of intense, central focus
In the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker reports that the work of David Park has “begun to have a restorative impact, rewarding in its viewers a humanistic taste discredited equally by avant-garde theory and by a degraded mass culture. Park died at 49 in 1960, but even then, long before […]
Paul Wonner, 87, dies in San Francisco
Paul Wonner, long associated with Bay Area Figuration, died Wednesday in San Francisco of natural causes on the eve of his 88th birthday. Art critic Kenneth Baker wrote the obit in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Mr. Wonner enjoyed collegial support for his work from originators of the Bay Area Figurative […]
Tom McKinley and Albert Oehlen in San Franciso
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker reports. “A paradox has always lain close to the heart of abstract painting: the idea of a picture without depiction. Various artists have mobilized this paradox for their own purposes in the past century or so. When Oehlen does it, he produces a […]
Diebenkorn arrives in New York
“Diebenkorn in New Mexico,” curated by Charles Strong and Charles M. Lovell; organized by the Harwood Museum in Taos, New Mexico. Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY. Through April 5. Click here to see images. Save those paintings from grad school. Between January 1950 and June 1952, Richard Diebenkorn was […]
Toenges, Tollens and the love of paint
“Michael Toenges and Peter Tollens,” Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Through Feb 23. German painters Michael Toenges and Peter Tollens, in thrall to the hedonistic, fleshy qualities of paint itself, explore different positions from the big, pluralistic manifesto of abstraction. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Kenneth Baker reports that […]
In San Francisco: Ouadahi, Bhujbal, Soloman
“Driss Ouadahi: Another Place, Another Me,” Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Through Dec. 8. Drawing upon a lifelong interest in architecture, Ouadahi creates a hybrid language of structural design and abstract painting that infuses the rigid form of monotonous buildings with color and light. Broad, multi-colored brushstrokes define volume and […]
