In April, Village Voice art critic R.C. Baker has a show at Zone:Contemporary Art (formerly Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts) that combines art, fiction, and design to create a multifaceted narrative that arcs from the Moscow show trials of 1937 to President Nixon�s resignation, in 1974. Divided into four […]
Tag: R.C. Baker
Terry Winters: Haltingly optimistic
In The Village Voice RC Baker writes that there’s something hard-fought and heartening about Terry Winters’s new paintings at Matthew Marks. “Chunks of intense color tumble and collide across garish or sooty or muddy matrices. Like our times, they’re fraught, complex, and scarred over, but also haltingly optimistic….In a 1992 […]
Tom Schmitt at Howard Scott
In The Village Voice, RC Baker reports that Schmitt’s years of painting make all the difference in these digitally-created formalist compositions. “The four orange squares in ‘Quad’ (2005) are divided by a gray grid; the transition between the two colors is as smoothly elusive as the intersections of colored light […]
John O’Connor: Recording small events, missteps, and changes of direction over time
In The Village Voice RC Baker reports that John O’Connor uses ‘haphazard research’ and personal obsession (body weight, lottery numbers, weather reports) as inspiration for his drawings, some of which are almost seven feet high. “This approach lends his charts and graphs a delectably organic feel, as layers of silky […]
Guston’s paint still looks wet
At MoMA, installed in the teeming atrium space, I was happy to see seven of Philip Guston’s cartoon paintings from the sixties and seventies. I agree with Village Voice critic RC Baker that the paintings look startlingly fresh. “Guston (1913�1980) began his career in the ’30s, with stolid scenes of […]
Everybody hearts painting, 4eva
“Painting: Now and Forever, Part II,” billed as “a highly subjective, celebratory survey of contemporary painting,” is a wonderfully seductive, understated show, at least the installation at Matthew Marks. The highlight for me was seeing one of Blinky Palermo‘s sewn fabric pieces for the first time. In The Village Voice, […]
Kerry James Marshall’s romance
In The Village Voice R.C. Baker calls Marshall’s paintings defiant kitsch. “Kerry James Marshall’s paintings of black people simply being human stand out in an art-industrial complex where subjects, artists, purveyors, and consumers are pretty much white folk. In his series of five large grisaille paintings, he imagines a young […]
Ann Craven’s bird and moon paintings
While Craven first exhibited paintings of the moon in 1996, she began the current series of moon paintings�now numbering into the hundreds�in 2001, working on the rooftop of her Harlem studio, also in Maine, and most recently in France, during a fall 2007 artist residency. Each of the small, square […]
Chan, Molnar and Wozniak at Platform
Launched in September 2007, Denise Bibro created Platform to highlight local New York-area curators, emerging artists and spotlight works outside of the mainstream. Currently on view is work by Amy Chan, Cheryl Molnar, and Karla Wozniak, who met during their undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design. I’m not […]
Mala Iqbal’s radiant calamity at PPOW
“Mala Iqbal: Washed Away,” P.P.O.W, New York, NY. Through January 5. In The Village Voice, RC Baker’s picks this week include Mala Iqbal’s garishly vivid, Disneyesque landscapes. “Imagine Max Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ (a corrosive 1942 painting conjuring the shattered landscape and psychological devastation of World War II) spray-bombed […]
