Tag: Sharon Butler

Solo Shows

Rebecca Morris: Resisting beauty

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.

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Solo Shows

Leslie Smith III: Poignantly off-balance

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.

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Gallery shows

Seductive non-objectives at Mother

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.

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Solo Shows

Peter Halley: On the cusp

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.

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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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