Contributed by Lisa Taliano / You need to be in front of a John Walker painting in order to get it. Its luminous qualities, the movement, scale, and touch of the brush carries us through the multiple layers and levels of reality shared and contained within and between us. The materiality of the paint works on our bodies directly. Seeing becomes feeling and sensing, understanding. Walker’s new work, now on view at Alexandre Gallery.
Tag: landscape
Nathaniel Robinson’s train of thought
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When Nathaniel Robinson takes the train from Brewster, New York, down to the city, he snaps pictures along the way. Hastily cropped and blurry in some areas, these images have become the basis for a series of sublime paintings on view at Devening Projects in Chicago.
Matthew Wong: Fearless to the end
Despite Matthew Wong’s relatively banal subject matter essentially, nature the way it is handled in the exhibition on view at Cheim and Read elevates the art and makes it enthralling, like secrets gently whispered.
ICYMI: Elizabeth Hazan
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Elizabeth Hazan�s earlier paintings were highly resolved meditations on Google map imagery and aerial landscape views of Long Island�s east end. The terrific new work, recently on display at Johnannes Vogt in a solo show called �Heat Wave,” is moving into a less certain, but, […]
Amna Asghar: Plumbing orientalism
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Amna Asghar�s gently captivating new paintings, on display at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery on the Lower East Side, explore a rich variety of experiences and perceptions associated with the geographical movement or cultural displacement. Such a shift could be a matter of orderly emigration, traumatic upheaval, or […]
Barbara Laube�s coexisting states of mind
Contributed by Carol Diamond / What is the difference between being with a person and seeing a picture of her, FaceTime versus a coffee date, eyeing a digital image of an artwork and standing in front of it? Perhaps we assume that we know the answer: one is real and […]
Maya Brym: Exceedingly magnanimous
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Brooklyn artist Maya Brym�s vivid new paintings, on view at Frosch & Portmann through February 24, invigorate domestic life with a sense of lightness and clarity. Geometric shapes defined by stencils and masks are painted in bright colors with wide, transparent brushstrokes. The shapes conjure […]
Interview with Jane Swavely: Toxic glow
Contributed by Sharon Butler / When Jane Swavely isn�t working in the old-school LES loft where she raised two sons, she is at a cabin in the Catskills or sailing around the northeast on a beautiful, sturdy sailboat that her husband built. The last time we met was on Cuttyhunk Island off the coast of Massachusetts, where she […]
Cathy Quinlan: Arcadian joy
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Cathy Quinlan, whose terrific new paintings and drawings are on view at Centotto in Bushwick, is old-fashioned. Instead of snapping images of paintings at galleries, she takes out her sketchbook and draws them, then posts them in �The Pencil Review,� a column at Talking Pictures, […]
Katherine Bradford�s night vision
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Katherine Bradford�s latest paintings of swimmers and night skies seem to have a new sense of anxiety and dread. In previous work, she explored the fullness of feeling, wonder, and connection under a starry sky, but now, in work on view through June 2 at Adams and Ollman in Portland, […]