Contributed by Patrick Neal / Full of bright and brimming lines and shapes, jumbled with quirky geometric forms and zippy colors, Gary Petersen’s paintings are giddy and uplifting. They bring to mind all manner of fun – vacation, travel, cartoons, toys, television, Creamsicles, candies, fruit slices and braided rag rugs, the flamboyant bills of toucans and pelicans. More deeply, his large abstract paintings exude a retro, utopian vibe that marries the hard-edge abstraction of late modernism with some of the quirkier strains of twentieth-century design.
Tag: Patrick Neal
Ellen Siebers: The visceral pull of her brush
Contributed by Patrick Neal / For her solo show, currently on view at March Gallery in the East Village, Ellen Siebers has created small paintings in oil on beveled birch panel that are poetic in their open-endedness and straightforward in their embrace of beauty.
Alyssa Klauer’s queer phantasmagoria
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Is the detectable hand of the artist evidence of a unique creator, or is gesture mainly indicative of earlier painters touches, the ghosts of art history? More broadly, do we choose the course of our own lives or are they predestined? These thoughts about individual sensibility and personal agency occurred to me while viewing Alyssa Klauers fine, visually and intellectually energized solo show Dare Me, on view at Olympia on the Lower East Side.
Alyssa Fanning: Ravishing Devastations
Physical and psychological effects of natural and man-made disasters are the subject of Alyssa Fannings delicate draawings, on view at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Kathryn Lynch: Allusive places
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Sometimes we see something better when we dont look directly at it. This thought permeated my viewing of Kathryn Lynchs impressive paintings at Turn Gallery on the Upper East Side. Her current exhibition, fittingly titled Between the Streets, showcases her crowning achievement as a painter: […]
Spencer Lewis�s mesmerizing formlessness
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Spencer Lewis�s large, colorful, gestural abstractions, on view at Harper�s Chelsea, are deliciously physical and boldly display the process of their own creation. Visible from the street and hung close together, the paintings get right in your face as you enter the gallery. Gallerist Harper […]
Maeve D�Arcy paints the passage of time
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Taking in the paintings of Maeve D�Arcy, currently on view at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, I kept thinking of the defunct movie rental store Kim�s Video that had long occupied Manhattan�s East and West Villages. These places were legendary repositories of arthouse films, and D�Arcy�s […]
Rob Ventura�s germy expressionism
Contributed by Patrick Neal / In earlier paintings, artist Rob Ventura explored the anatomical and cellular characteristics of toxic flowers � a menacing subject that would lead to a parallel interest in the structures of disease-causing microorganisms. Ventura had completed new paintings centered on viruses, fungi and bacteria in the […]
The painterly photographs of Jan Groover
Contributed by Patrick Neal / I�ve been thinking a lot about the work of photographer Jan Groover. This started a few months ago when the artist and critic David Ambrose mentioned her, and I learned she had been a long-term faculty member at SUNY Purchase and teacher of the wildly […]
Conversation: Eric Wolf talks about his expansive art collection
Contributed by Patrick Neal / The painter Eric Wolf is someone I have known since we met as students at Skowhegan School of Art in 1989. At Skowhegan, working outside during all-in-one sessions, Wolf devised a style of landscape painting that was direct and minimal, using only black ink on […]