Tag: Riad Miah

Solo Shows

Philemona Williamson’s threshold states 

Contributed by Riad Miah / Philemona Williamson’s paintings delve deeply into the concept of arrested development. For her, the term signifies a profound state of emotional or psychological stagnation, often linked to unresolved childhood issues. Yet her overall vision is expansive and not unhopeful. In her current exhibition of 15 large and small oil-on-canvas works at June Kelly Gallery, complex narratives inform her paintings and affect the very process of their creation while remaining purposefully unarticulated.

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Solo Shows

Andrea Belag: Fusing gesture, light and color

Contributed by Riad Miah / Andrea Belag, in her current exhibition, “Twombly’s Green”at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, uses oil paint as a calligrapher might, employing sweeping gestural marks, scrapes, and wipes, as well as color itself, as her visual vocabulary. The paintings, of course, are not to be “read” in a linear manner but rather to be encountered and experienced. 

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Gallery shows

Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen: Two for the show

Contributed by Riad Miah / Artists often become domestic partners. It’s an iteration of human nature. For one person to be attracted to another who has a similar creative sensibility and lifestyle is normal and sensible. Well-known examples include Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. While coupledom can be exhilarating for both partners, it can also be tense, competitive, and destructive. Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen had never considered showing together until settling on their current show at Equity Gallery, aptly titled “Feedback Loop.” They appear to have struck a healthy balance between separation and synergy.

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Solo Shows

John O’Connor’s formidable pencil

Contributed by Riad Miah / John O’Connor’s tools are basic and everyday, materials that one might think a child would use for their initial foray into art making. For his works on paper, many now on display in his solo exhibition “Man Bites Dog Bites Man” by way of Pierogi and L’SPACE, he uses colored pencils and graphite. But behind the simple tools is a discerning mind.

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Solo Shows

The evolution of Justine Hill

Contributed by Riad Miah / It is a pleasure to watch an artist evolve and see surprising changes, as in the case of Justine Hill with her current exhibition “Omphalos” at Dimin Gallery. Over the course of four solos, elements of her work have remained consistent. These include the cut-out shapes that jostle to fit together, and the color that complements (or contradicts) abutting forms. Hill’s earlier work has been likened to the masterful Elizabeth Murray’s. The comparison was apt enough insofar as she, like Murray, worked on irregularly shaped canvases, but it didn’t seem to go much deeper than that until now.

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Solo Shows

Leigh Behnke’s fluid sense of time

Contributed by Riad Miah / What’s a ghostly-looking ship doing in the city? Probably the same thing as the ethereal-looking figures passing through a similarly urban environment. In Leigh Behnke’s solo show “Time Travelers and Ghost Ships” at the School of Visual Arts’ Flatiron Project Space, enticing and mysterious paintings of such phenomena stimulate contemplation of the future as a manifestation of how we treat the present.

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Solo Shows

Gale force: Alyse Rosner at Rick Wester

Contributed by Riad Miah / “Bracing Against the Wind,” the title of Alyse Rosner’s solo exhibition at Rick Wester Fine Art, can be read literally and poetically. While her paintings depict dynamic elements of nature, they also reveal the intuitive hand of the artist. This allows the viewer to decode her process in making them, which includes rubbing, repetitive application, imparting decorative motifs, and more.

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Exhibition essay

Riad Miah: My eyes just heard my brain

Contributed by Sharon Butler / As I walk through the dimly lit space behind an elegantly nostalgic bespoke clothing store on the Lower East Side, I feel as if I’ve landed in Desperately Seeking Susan, the iconic film starring Madonna that captured New York creative life of the 1980s. On the other side of a worn red curtain looms Riad Miah’s bright, busy studio. Confronting me is a plethora of colorful canvases, covered with writhing shapes, floating freely on irregular canvases.

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Solo Shows

Ridley Howard: Provocative incongruity

Contributed by Riad Miah / Athens, Georgia-based painter Ridley Howard’s new body of work, now on display at his third solo show at Marinaro, continues to explore relationships between figuration and abstraction with a refined pop sensibility, easing effortlessly between small and larger formats. The gallery’s abundant new space on Broadway is ideal, allowing viewers to absorb shifts in scale and reflect on contrasting elements, which Howard now seems to have fully resolved and mastered.

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Solo Shows

Fran O’Neill: Gestural heroine

Contributed by Riad Miah / The eleven oil paintings in Fran O’Neill’s solo show “Left Turn” at Equity Gallery traffic in vivid, vibrant gestures of color that form softly curved, ribbon-like shapes. While they bring to mind artists like James Nares, Karin Davie, and David Reed, O’Neill’s energetic but self-consciously controlled brushstrokes and honed sense of color and light more directly suggest instants of becoming or emergence. Reaching back so full-bloodedly to revisit gestural painting, and to exploit the expressive potential of abstraction and the flexibility of its formal attributes, somehow seems heroic.

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