Tag: Sharon Butler

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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Museum Exhibitions

Painting? Painting?

Contributed by Sharon Butler / At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curators Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan have organized “Painter Painter,” an exhibition comprising work by fifteen artists, some of whom are working with painting materials in ways that are often labeled “painting” but may be more firmly rooted in  Minimalism and Process Art than with the formidable history of painting and abstraction. Considering the work presented in this show as well as the work selected for the deCordova Museum’s “Paint Things,” perhaps we aren’t experiencing an expansion of painting as the curators have proposed, but rather a return to handmade sculptural objects…that sometimes have paint on them or are hung on the wall.

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Artist's Notebook

Looking back: Precisionism

Contributed by Sharon Butler /Back in the 1920s during the early days of industrialization, the Precisionists were drawn to the welded geometric forms of steel mills, bridges, water towers, smoke stacks, factory complexes, and coal mines.

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