Award-winning blogazine, primarily about painting
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Stephen Maine’s abstract paintings, on view at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, hit you head-on with their optically charged surfaces and imposing presence. The gallery, which has a penchant for showing large-scale work, is exhibiting in its main space several of Maine’s signature “residue paintings” – spongy, all-over compositions with gorgeous, saturated colors in acrylic on canvas – that are over eight feet by six feet.
Contributed by Kylie Heidenheimer / I spoke to John Molloy recently about the unusual programming at his eponymous Upper East Side gallery, where his exhibitions often include work by contemporary artists from the New York area alongside antique Native American art, and how studying with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham still influences his perspective. Currently, the gallery is hosting a vibrant three-person show with work by Stephen Maine, Melissa Staiger, and Naomi Cohn called “TECHNIC/ Color.”
Contributed by Stephen Maine/ On view at the University of Connecticut’s Contemporary Art Galleries through November 29 is “Constructed,” a lively exhibition of seventeen works by five distinguished midcareer painters whose handling of color — as a kind of visual armature — is inseparable from structure. The show’s curator, Museum […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / KK Kozik�s novel ICEHOUSE Project Space, located on the quaint town green in Sharon, Connecticut, is an old 10 x 15-foot wooden shed that was once used to store ice from nearby Mudge Pond. Stephen Maine hung his first site-specific painting there this past November. However […]
Curated by artists Elisabeth Condon and Carol Prusa, “POUR,” an exhibition that examines the use of poured paint in contemporary art practice, opens this week at the Schmidt Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, Florida. Condon, a painting professor at University of South Florida and Prusa, a painting prof at FAU, tapped Stephen Maine to write the essay, which references Pollock, Kaprow, Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, James Brooks and others.
Artist and critic Stephen Maine sends news that he has curated a show at Alpan Gallery in Huntington, Long Island, “Beauty Marks and Body Parts,” that kicks off the gallery’s guest curatorial program. Alpan, founded by Nese Karakaplan in 1987, is a non-profit space whose stated mission is to support […]
For painters like me, curating group shows, although time consuming, helps articulate more specifically what what we’re investigating in our own work. Here are three good examples of shows curated by painters. Please feel free to leave links in the Comments section if you know of others. “Present Tense,” curated […]
In the NY Sun, Stephen Maine reports that Dieter Roth’s work possesses some of the neo-Dada characteristics of Pop art, but is “as enmeshed with dissolution and decay as his American contemporaries were smitten with antiseptic consumerism. Today, Roth’s greatest notoriety proceeds from olfactorily transgressive works confected of fugitive materials, […]
In his first solo show at Canada, Matt Connors presents a predictably sloppy version of modernism. Although I don’t see the “rigor of an Ellsworth Kelly ” that’s mentioned in the press release (are they pulling my leg?), the awkward color, not-quite geometric shapes and flat-footed paint handling have a […]
In the NY Sun, painter/critic Stephen Maine usually provides an entertainingly illuminating read. This week, Maine considers abstract painters Ruth Root and John Zinsser. “Creative maturation is a tricky business. While no one talks about ‘developing a style’ anymore, many artists do look to refine their approach to core material […]
