Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Please join us: The 2024 iteration of Dumbo Open Studios, takes place this weekend! Painter and Two Coats publisher Sharon Butler will have some new paintings on view at the Two Coats of Paint Project Space (20 Jay Street #308), and she has also organized “BIG TOP,” an exhibition of 13 talented young artists she met while teaching in the University of Connecticut’s MFA Program.
Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Last week, “La Banda 2024” opened at Tapetto Volante, a gallery tucked into a group of Gowanus studio spaces, currently inhabited by artists Inna Babaeva and Lenora Loeb. The show features work by many of the stalwart artist-organizers in Brooklyn’s art community, who keep the outer-borough art conversation percolating despite the relative inattention of mainstream media that focus more on Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Tribeca.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / While nostalgia and the yearning it precipitates may be gripping the art world, Cordy Ryman’s gently dazzling painting installations, on view at Freight + Volume, are unapologetically about the here and now – that is, what’s happening in one place today. Titled “Monkey Mind Symphony,” the show captures the distractions we encounter day by day, minute by minute. What could be more apt for our time than a visual language comprising small objects? Logically, they are the physical manifestations of tweets or threads, crafted easily, sometimes beguilingly unfinished in the traditional sense of the word, and arranged so as to radiate Ryman’s idiosyncratic energy.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski was widely and deservedly recognized for making intimately scaled abstract paintings using an idiosyncratic visual language that was derived from the visual and emotional stimuli of everyday life. Since his death in 2019, I’ve often wondered who might be the next Nozkowski. Given the trend towards figuration, mixed-media surfaces, and massive scale, precious few painters seemed to be walking in his humble footsteps. Now we have Patricia Satterlee and Fran Shalom.
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.
Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Rebecca Morris, a masterly abstract painter who could do pretty if she wanted to, insists that when a painting starts to look beautiful she catches herself on and pivots to more discomfiting territory. That kind of grim integrity and its visual realization has an austere appeal, but there’s no need right now to get into the niceties of infinite regress or meta paradox. Judging by her solo show at Bortolami, parsimoniously titled “#31” after the number of solo shows she has presented during her career, Morris does consciously resist the pursuit of visual beauty and representation. The large-scale oil-and-spray-paint works are all untitled, distinguished only by parenthetical number indicating the year and the order in which the paintings were made. Each canvas is replete with vivid color and divergent shapes but embodies an irresolute and disconsolate state of play. This could ramify for a given viewer in any number of ways – though not, presumably, as lovely.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Reaching for Something High,”Leslie Smith III’s first NYC solo show, on view at Chart, is a virtuosic blending of influences and themes, reflected in the delicate complexity of eight shaped paintings on thick stretchers floating with trenchant awkwardness on the wall. Each painting comprises many smaller, oddly shaped canvases, each of them individually constructed and stretched and, for the most part, lightly painted.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I’ve always thought of non-objective art as an especially challenging type of abstraction that doesn’t rely on a visual relationship to the world for meaning. Rather, it conveys meaning through metaphor, material choices, and processes. Sometimes text is incorporated, and, in painting, color and compositional selections play important roles. But the underlying ideas are equally important. Non-objective artists like to mull and ruminate, creating work that gives the viewer something to not only to experience but also to think about. In “I am the Passenger” a two-part group show at Mother Gallery in Beacon, NY, artist-curators Paola Oxao, Trudy Benson, and Russell Tyler articulate two key aspects of non-objective approaches. One is the relationship that non-objective art has with the body – sight, touch, and proximity. The second is the mysterious ability of materials – through texture, shape, and color – to “stir something” that is both personal and universal, as the stars and the sky do in the passenger of Iggy Pop’s eponymous song. The work in the second part of the project, now on view, focuses on this uncanny allure.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Peter Halley’s catalogue raisonné needs to be updated. This month, a group of his paintings from 1980 and 1981 are on display in a gratifyingly revelatory two-gallery collaboration between Craig Starr on the Upper East Side and Karma in the East Village. Most of the paintings have rarely been shown, a few never, and I was delighted to see them, however belatedly.
