Contributed by Patrick Neal / There is a particular kind of thrill in trying to understand what is going on in Seth Becker’s paintings that involves separating what’s strange from what’s familiar. The subjects of his small oil paintings are peculiar, and so are the lenses through which he approaches a person, place, or thing. His solo show “Field Music” currently on view at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY, occupying two floors and comprising around 40 small-scale oil paintings, embodies the painter’s slow-burn perversity.
Tag: Patrick Neal
Michael Aaron Lee: The frame is the subject
Contributed by Patrick Neal / The spacious new apartment gallery Nightshift in Crown Heights is in a charming pre-war brownstone. Hardwood floors with Celtic knot patterns, elegant banisters, inlaid lights, and period furniture appear to be complemented by attractive silver and gold metalworks that straddle the walls. Closer inspection reveals that these glistening low-relief wallworks are made of paper coated with graphite and metallic gouache. The illusion of metal is particularly radiant from different points in the entryway, where the shiny exterior textures of each piece capture the sunlight and warm colors of the surrounding room. These paper sculptures, along with drawings and collages, comprise Michael Aaron Lee’s “A Frame is a Line,” his inaugural solo show for the gallery.
Stephen Maine’s hands-off abstraction
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Stephen Maine’s abstract paintings, on view at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, hit you head-on with their optically charged surfaces and imposing presence. The gallery, which has a penchant for showing large-scale work, is exhibiting in its main space several of Maine’s signature “residue paintings” – spongy, all-over compositions with gorgeous, saturated colors in acrylic on canvas – that are over eight feet by six feet.
Gary Petersen’s Populuxe abstraction
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.
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 […]