Tag: Peter Plagens

Solo Shows

Peter Plagens’ portals and vortexes

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Peter Plagens’ bracing new abstract paintings don’t so much as invite you in as dare you not to enter. Each canvas consists of three basic components: a painted frame of washy gray or brown; a pristinely rendered hard-edge shape, assertively opaque, centrally positioned, vertically symmetrical, and horizontally striated; and scattered, seemingly directional slashes. The second feature propels the paintings, but the other two steer them. The distinctly dilute vagueness of the frames might impart risk, the pesky shards impulse, and the vivid, intuitively color-coded ramps expansive fate – humble versions of Jacob’s Ladder, vouchsafing a future that need not be feared, at least distantly echoing one of Dave Hickey’s blithely peremptory and eminently arguable mantras: “Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.” 

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Museum Exhibitions

LA PST Report: Toward better social behavior 

Contributed by Peter Plagens / The first edition of the Getty-sponsored “Pacific Standard Time” slate of exhibitions in 2011 was subtitled simply “Art in L.A., 1945 – 1980,” and it aimed to elucidate Southern California’s contribution to American postwar modern art. In 2017, the second iteration was called “LA/LA,” indicating the city’s Latin American art and artists. This time around PST has declared a more specific theme, “Art and Science Collide,” reminiscent of one of those noble Rose Parade rubrics…

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Interviews

Text and image: Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens

Contributed by Sharon Butler / I had some questions for Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens — artists, writers, spouses who have a two-person exhibition of abstract paintings on view at Texas Gallery in Houston through December 16. After they were evicted from their Tribeca loft a couple years ago, they decamped to Litchfield County, where they both have studios in their home — a beautifully converted auto body shop. In her seventies, Fendrich is a Professor Emerita of Fine Arts and Art History at Hofstra University and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. After writing regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education for many years, she now writes fiction and contributes art reviews to Two Coats of Paint. Plagens, in his eighties, is the art critic at The Wall Street Journal and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. My interrogation about the evolution of their painting lives over the course of some fifty years started during an early morning text exchange that became so rich and resonant I asked if Two Coats of Paint could publish an expanded version.

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