Tag: Sharon Butler

Solo Shows

Chris Dorland, historian for the future

Contributed by Sharon Butler / As curators Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick pointed out for their 2022 summer show “The Painter’s New Tools,” most painters use computers in the studio, whether to make composite image studies, scan and print 3-D models, create animations, or simply display large-scale imagery. To a greater or lesser degree, all artists are engaged in digital practice these days. Chris Dorland goes at least a meta-step farther. His dazzling paintings, on display in “shellcode” at Lyles & King, are indeed made with digital tools. But Dorland’s new work is primarily about the evolution of the digital environment itself.

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Solo Shows

Howard Smith: One brushstroke at a time

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Howard Smith’s understated paintings, on view at Jane Lombard Gallery, are created through a meticulous process of accumulation. Call the technique abstract pointillism. The surfaces are covered with small dots, dashes and brushstrokes, building loosely woven fields of color that sometimes form recognizable geometric shapes. The pieces in this show vary in size from one-inch to eight-feet wide, but the size of the marks remains the same. In most, the color at first glance appears monochromatic, but subtle variations within unified fields create illusions of light and shallow space. In his most recent paintings, the smallest flecks of color are innovatively contrasted with larger dots of different colors. Smith has spent years working in this way. It must be intensely hermetic and time-consuming, but it seems to have been rewarding.

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Solo Shows

Michael Krebber: The poetry in painting?

Contributed by Sharon Butler / I used to think about beginnings, doubt, and irresolution. Lately, though, in my own work and that of other painters, I’ve come to appreciate more rather than less paint on the canvas. It appears that Michael Krebber, now painting in oil, has evolved in a similar direction. In his eighth show at Greene Naftali, two large diptychs, Doll in Pink and La Poupe, look to question his once emphatic emptiness, manifesting more pronounced back-and-forth between layers, edges, shapes and color, more varied brushwork, and, overall, a more intense engagement with paint and brushwork.

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Solo Shows

Karin Davie’s new sense of self

Contributed by Sharon Butler/ At Chart, Karin Davie, in her first NYC show since 2007, has moved with elegant decisiveness from pop-inflected stripes, slapdash and dripping, to wide, sine-wave brushstrokes that gently oscillate in glowing geometric formations.

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Solo Shows

Peter Halley: The new unreality

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In his first solo show at Greene Naftali, Peter Halley contends with the new American reality of an increasingly shameless and authoritarian state under which, despite the best efforts of an overstretched free press and an embattled political opposition, the difference between fact and fiction has become increasingly obscured. Halley has outfitted the cavernous gallery with metallic floor-to-ceiling digital prints, tweaked lighting, a handful of his signature paintings, and intermittent sound emissions to create a disturbing sense of unease and “topsy-turvy disorientation. In the back room, as a mordant coda, Halley has included one of Robert Morris’s 1978 sculptures made of classical architectural fragments and a distorting fun house mirror.

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Solo Shows

Rebecca Morris: Loving the unbeautiful

Rebecca Morris likes to compartmentalize. Her paintings, smartly installed at Mary Boone’s Fifth Avenue location through February 25, feature symmetrically placed geometric shapes, sometimes collaged onto the surfaces of the large-scale canvases. Each of the shapes, large squares or circles,is divided into numerous smaller shapes that have been casually filled with improvised patterns, line, and brushwork. Morris’s paintings at first seem aligned with work by contemporary painters like, say, Trudy Benson, Lauren Silva, or Leah Guadagnoli, who use kitschy elements from ’80s graphics–stepped rules, drop shadows, squiggles, pastel palettes. But rather than evoking the gormless charm of this earlier era, Morris’s abstractions are confrontational and challenging

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Studio Visit

Interview: Medrie MacPhee in Ridgewood

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Medrie MacPhee’s pensively beautiful paintings first came to my attention at the 2015 American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibit. The paintings she had in the show, abstract with architectural references, featured deconstructed pieces of clothing subtly collaged onto the surfaces. MacPhee is a very accomplished artist. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, she earned her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and then, in 1976, moved to NYC. Since then, she has racked up numerous shows and awards, including a Guggenheim, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, an Elizabeth Greenshields Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Grants, and Canada Council Established Artist Grants. After 25 years in a loft on the Bowery, she and her partner–filmmaker Harold Crooks–moved to Queens, where they bought a small building with first-floor garage that MacPhee has turned into a studio. We talked about image, process, surface, content, and the impulse to add clothing to her canvases.

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Studio Visit

Interview: Leslie Smith III in Madison, Wisconsin

I took a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, in December, when the sky was gray but before the temperature had turned bitter. My guide was Leslie Smith III, a 2009 Yale MFA graduate with a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art who will have paintings on display at VOLTA next week with beta pictoris gallery / Maus Contemporary. Smith is an assistant professor of drawing and painting at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has a generous studio in the art building on campus. During my visit, he showed me his new paintings, which are purely abstract, comprising multi-panel shaped canvases, vivid, high-key color, and wobbly geometric shapes. We talked about the painting process, his shift to shaped canvases, and his transition from figurative work to abstraction.

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