Contributed by Sharon Butler / Gouache, an expensive opaque watercolor-like paint, has been around for millennia. It dries fast, yields a sublime matte finish, and […]
An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Saturday, March 14, 2026
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Doomscrolling 3-D IRL: The 2026 Whitney BiennialMarch 14, 2026Contributed by Sharon Butler / The Whitney Biennial 2026 has a knack for knocking the human project, wistfully and ruefully examining the past, and planting dread about the future. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, made 300 studio visits, ultimately winnowing the roster down to 56 artists, duos, and collectives. The curators’ definition of what is “American” is expansive; the artists’ birthplaces span the globe, and many have settled in the US after fleeing wars and other forms of political turmoil.......
2025’s intrepid cinemaMarch 13, 2026Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 2025, movies seemed to catch up with and confront the Trump era. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another – based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland and nimbly arraying multiple stars with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead – is a deeply informed outcry of conscience and resistance, chiseled by satire into a grand statement. Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ creepily penetrating and funny......
Sally Gall: What am I looking at?March 10, 2026Contributed by Leslie Wayne / I recently had the pleasure of visiting the artist Sally Gall in her midtown studio on a cold and snowy day – a perfect opportunity to get out of my own head and into the mind and process of someone else. Gall is a photographer of natural phenomena, yet her images are otherworldly and hard to identify. They include close-up undersides of laundry hanging from clotheslines on a windy day, faraway kites, and rock faces that look like Franz Kline paintings....
Mira Schor: UncensoredMarch 10, 2026Contributed by Jonah James Romm / How does one acquire language? How do words shape identity and meaning? These questions might strike you upon entering Mira Schor’s exhibition “Figures of Speech” at Lyles & King. Bringing together a previously unseen body of the artist’s work from the 1980s and paintings from the last two years, the exhibition traces the compelling self-referential progression of Schor’s work over the last four decades. ...
Two Coats Resident Artist: Nichole van Beek, March 16–20March 6, 2026Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, Two Coats of Paint is glad to welcome Nichole van Beek to the Residency Program, from March 16–20. For a show at the Morris N. Flecker Memorial Gallery in 2017, when she still lived and worked in NYC, Matthew Neil Gehring aptly introduced her paintings as “macrocosmic encounters with impossible and tantalizing illusions situated in a space that is once grounded in the familiar, the natural, yet is infinitely expansive.” She moved from NYC to the hollows of the Appalachian Mountains several years ago and found new content and media for her art practice, but she has retained the fine balance Gehring described between the big picture and smaller ones....
Tappeto Volante’s rich conversationsMarch 6, 2026Contributed by Jonathan Agin / The fifth annual “La Banda” show at Tappeto Volante Projects in Gowanus features relatively new paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by over three dozen mostly local artists. Though no designated theme governs the show, it was forged in the pandemic era and celebrates New York’s creative and communal spirit. Populating a cozy space with such a density of art practices can’t help but generate new discourses across mediums, subjects, and generations. ...
Kate Hargrave: Unsettling and generousMarch 5, 2026Contributed by Lore Heller / “MILK TEETH,” the title of Kate Hargrave’s show at Karma, implies both permanent loss and permanent gain. One gains milk teeth as a baby and loses them as adult teeth take their place. If children place them under their pillows, fairies might bring rewards. Losing milk teeth is losing childhood, developing permanent teeth coming of age – reminders to parents that time inexorably arcs life. Joni Mitchell observed that “we’re captive on the carousel of time,” and my grandmother’s lullaby, “toyland, toyland, beautiful boy and girl land,” reminds us that “once you cross its borders you may never return again.” Hargrave, who painted this work as she raised two children, captures this pervasively bittersweet quality....
Felix Beaudry’s malleable boysMarch 4, 2026Contributed by Bill Arning / There is something wildly compelling when an installation flips on you—reversing itself in meaning and affect if you linger more than five minutes. Felix Beaudry’s “Malleable Boys” at Situations is one of those shows. On first entry, oversized, lumpy, monstrous heads loom and encircle you like funhouse demons. They feel nightmarish—deformed, melting, mid-metamorphosis into dangerous humanoid creatures. But stay a beat longer and the menace softens. They become almost cute, like huggable, overgrown Cabbage Patch Kids—less terrifying than misunderstood....
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