Tag: Lucas Moran

Solo Shows

Darren Bader: Flossing

Contributed by Lucas Moran / Making sense of art is not easy. You can’t pin down meaning when it keeps moving. Darren Bader’s new show “Youth,” now on view at Matthew Brown Gallery, vividly illustrates the point. Bader has been called a prankster and an absurdist, elevating the ridiculous into high art. His earlier projects included injecting lasagna with heroin, stuffing a brass instrument with shrimp, and giving away live kittens. He provides bits of text that hint at deeper meaning while refusing to settle into it. Filling a gallery with art that plays conceptual games with history and humor and still looks good is no easy trick. But Bader pulls it off.

Group Shows

Summoning, Conjuring, Coaxing: A trend emerges in Bushwick

Contributed by Lucas Moran / Maybe death isn’t final but simply a door leading into another room. That feeling ran through “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” an excellent group show at Active Space in Bushwick curated by Patrick Bower and Robert Zurer of Immaterial Projects. It tapped into whatever lies just beyond perception: the subconscious, the occult, the spirits, the talismans, the circus freaks. Everything half-seen or half-remembered was allowed to take shape. If contemporary painting has drifted away from figuration and identity, this show suggested we may be heading towards something more concealed – art that conjures rather than describes, call it hiddenist painting, embracing what is buried, invisible, or occulted, where death, memory, and imagination loop into one.

Solo Shows

Dan Schein’s muddy sublime

Contributed by Lucas Moran / On Instagram, where most artists list their websites, exhibitions, and accomplishments beneath their handles, Dan Schein keeps it simple: “artist/painter,” followed by “Person Who Stutters.” It’s fitting for a painter whose work, some now on display at JJ Murphy Gallery, feels as though it may sometimes have a tough time coming out of him. But Schein, a painter’s painter, knows how to elicit beauty from struggle….