Contributed by Sharon Butler / While working on “The Portrait Project” – the incisive and absorbing set of paintings depicting various artists (including me) now on display at The Painting Center – Chase Cantwell was also exploring his personal relationship to gender…. As progressive ideas about gender and transition gained traction, Chase switched pronouns and began identifying publicly as a man. Painting portraits after working abstractly for twenty years clearly reflects his transition as an artist. Beyond that, it may somehow echo his defining personal experience of transition.
Tag: The Painting Center
Body Language at The Painting Center
Contributed by Carol Diamond / Now on display at The Painting Center, the group exhibition titled The Body in Question, a phrase cheekily resonant of a coroners report, explores the body as a vessel for communicating experience through painting. Curators Ophir Agassi and Karen Wilkin have adroitly presented a diverse group of ten distinguished contemporary painters connected by their focus on the human figure.
Andrew Zarou’s particular beat
Contributed by Ben Pritchard / Andrew Zarous compelling exhibition at The Painting Center is resonant of the comprehensive order that one might covet in a time of unusual disarray, isolation, and uncertainty, when basic aims like survival and sharing have become politicized. Order, in this sense, is not strict thinking […]
Thomas Berding: Something wild
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Thomas Berding�s insouciant show �Field Test,� at The Painting Center in Chelsea, is a smart, spirited consideration of the tension between the whirl and the pastoral. The seven paintings � and their witty titles � are straightforward enough to impart primary messages clearly, but that leaves […]
Barbara Laube�s coexisting states of mind
Contributed by Carol Diamond / What is the difference between being with a person and seeing a picture of her, FaceTime versus a coffee date, eyeing a digital image of an artwork and standing in front of it? Perhaps we assume that we know the answer: one is real and […]
Artists’ spaces: The Painting Center
Contributed by Sharon Butler / I was on Facebook the other day and noticed Dana Gordon�s post about the history of The Painting Center. Back in the 1990s, when NYC galleries were centered in Soho, curators were more interested in video, installation, conceptual, and performance projects than they were in […]