Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / A great asset of abstract art is its capacity to accommodate in a single picture phenomena that don’t readily fit together in real life and make some kind of sense out of them. There are as many ways to exploit that capacity as there are artists. In her solo show “Loggia” now on view at Helm Contemporary, comprising three large pieces and several smaller ones, Kim Uchiyama distills visual tropes of nature – water, shoreline, forest, desert, and more – into configurations of color that project an idealized but grounded spatial relationship between outside and inside, broadly construed. It’s a quietly ambitious agenda, and she is successful in no small part because her brand of geometric abstraction is so egalitarian: no single element seems more or less important than another.
Tag: Kim Uchiyama
James Nelson: Breaking and entering
Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / James Nelson’s immersive drawings in “Glass Breaks,” his current solo show at McKenzie Fine Art, elude formalist analysis. Myriad marks […]
Beyond time: Brice Marden’s last paintings
Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / The dreamtime, as understood in Aboriginal culture, is a fully integrated reality lived daily, a total experience that holds past, present, and future in balance. From this perspective, the late Brice Marden’s last paintings feel both old and new, evoking an ancient mindset while embodying a new sentience and haptic presence born of the vulnerability and fragile urgings that arose as he grappled with his aging body and the ravages of cancer. The show’s title, Let the painting make you, is apt. It is fundamental to Marden’s work that painting spoke through him from the inside out: although he always adhered to his own set of rules, he never imposed an intellectualized concept on his creations.
Michael Brennan’s moving images
Two Coats of Paint invited painter Kim Uchiyama to sit down with Michael Brennan to discuss “Floating Weeds,” Brennan’s fourth solo show at Minus Space. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discuss Japanese film, Russell Lee’s photographs, Charles Olson’s poetry, Venetian lagoons, architect Carlo Scarpa, Homer, and more.
Kim Uchiyama’s quasi-sacred spaces
Contributed by Michael Brennan / The seven large paintings in Kim Uchiyama’s solo show “Heat and Shadow” at The Lobby Gallery were inspired by Greek temples located in Sicily. They are rigorous, modernist, and abstract. But what might ancient sacred spaces have to offer anyone in midtown Manhattan in 2022?
Jill Nathanson: Remarkable synesthesia
Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / Intriguingly titled Light Phrase, Jill Nathansons current exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery features luminous planes of crystalline color meeting and […]
Between object and metaphor: Berger, Lledos, and Uchiyama
Contributed by Karen Schifano / Reacting to the overtly emotional critical response to Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella sought to refine Greenbergian formalism by reducing painting […]
On its own terms: “Specific Forms” at Loretta Howard
Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / �Specific Forms� at Loretta Howard Gallery illuminates a particular moment in 20th century art history where works created by a […]
























