Contributed by Sharon Butler / Cora Cohen panel discussion; Two Coats Open Studio Jun 3; Twenty by Sixteen at Morgan Lehman; Zombie Formalism 12 years later; Last call for Abstract by Definition; more
Tag: Tom McGlynn
AAA at 90: Keep on looking
Contributed by Leslie Roberts / The exhibition “Abstract by Definition” at Art Cake celebrates the 90th anniversary of the American Abstract Artists (AAA). The show is subtitled “An Index,” but is not one in the usual sense – not, that is, an itemized set of categories, styles, intentions, or formal languages defining abstract art. Curator Saul Ostrow has instead organized groups of several works – usually four. This installation effectively highlights the particular qualities of each piece, and emphasizes the diversity of what we call contemporary abstraction.
Sharon’s Substack / May 1, 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from Joy Amina Garnett, a friend, painter, and one of the earliest art bloggers. She stopped painting and left NYC in 2020, moved to LA, started writing a memoir about her family of intellectual Egyptian ancestors – now finished and forthcoming as The Bee Kingdom (Gaudy Boy, 2026)– and hasn’t looked back. She invited me to publish some images of my recent paintings in the Evergreen Review, where she has been the art editor for several years. Evergreen is a storied literary magazine founded in 1957 by…
Sharon’s Substack / April 1, 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Reading Gary Garrels’ remembrance of Brice Marden in Artforum in 2023, I encountered a Rothko quote to the effect that paintings are about basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. I was not inclined to think about my work in that way, so I spent some time reading about basic human emotions, which, in my placid New England family, were generally dismissed without much examination….
Kylie Heidenheimer’s ecstatic dissonances
Contributed by Bill Arning / Private Public Gallery has earned its reputation for mounting deeply considered exhibitions of painting that honor artists who have spent decades refining their own private grammars of mark and color. Entered through a small garden – an architectural prelude that feels almost ceremonial – the gallery offers a perfect threshold for work that rewards slow, attentive looking. “Here, Elsewhere,” Kylie Heidenheimer’s first solo exhibition there, is fully in that lineage.
Barbara Friedman’s exquisite grotesquery
Contributed by Adam Simon / The modus operandi behind much of Barbara Friedman’s work, including her current exhibition “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” at Frosch & Co., has a name, pareidolia, which refers to finding images within abstraction. Think of the age-old pastime of finding faces in clouds.
Alan Prazniak: Balancing the artisanal and the epicurean
Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Alan Prazniak’s paintings fall into productive intervals between landscape and still-life and between abstraction and representation. His most recent show at Geary comprises sixteen medium and small paintings (all from 2024) that are rigorously composed and wide-ranging in palette, bringing to mind the lyrical abstractions of Philip Guston and the quasi-landscape compositions of Nicolas de Staël. Prazniak has acknowledged as inspirations Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley’s groundbreaking works, which embodied similarly massed shapes in bold, contrasting colors. The modernist tension…
Tom McGlynn: Meta-minimalist-abstraction
Contributed by Adam Simon / At first glance, Tom McGlynn’s paintings, on display at his solo show “What Gives” at Rick Wester Fine Art, seem to be examples of minimalist abstraction, free of narrative, subject, or anything associative. His arrangements of rectangles of solid color on a monochromatic field evoke modernism’s utopian origins: Mondrian, Van Doesburg, De Stijl, Neo-plasticism, painting purged of anything that could be thought extraneous. For contemporary abstract painters, however, these basic shapes are historically weighted signifiers, no longer free of association. One cannot now make a geometric abstract painting without it also being a depiction of a geometric abstract painting. McGlynn is fully aware of this doubling. For him, it isn’t a quandary as much as a defining characteristic of his work. What is remarkable is that, out of such seemingly depleted soil, he can conjure such visual richness.
Non-intent, or, questioning the tyranny of curatorial premise, at Osmos Address
“Mind the Gaps” at the Osmos space on East 1st Street takes as its curatorial premise that it has no consistent curatorial premise and so offers a welcome respite to the incessant connecting of dots of contemporary life. The curatorial statement of non-intent leaves viewers to “puzzle out their own version of coherence.”
Claire Seidl: Unbounded in time
Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Claire Seidl’s contemplative works are closely aligned with the Abstract Expressionist/Existentialist ideal whereby the painter must be eminently present in order to access and transmit the sincerity of experience. Her paintings are not history bound, however, but rooted in the perennial quest for a very personal gesture unbounded.
Carolanna Parlato�s sporting informe
Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Carolanna Parlato, to my mind, has been building up to her most recent show of paintings for about 25 years, […]
Meet the 2019 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program recipients
This year the 17 artists who get free studio space in DUMBO were selected by jurors Ellen Altfest, Phong Bui, Deborah Kass, Philip Pearlstein, and […]
Tom McGlynn: Liberating geometric shapes
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Tom McGlynn’s enigmatically reductive paintings are a study in subtle contrasts between systematization and autonomy, order and disarray. Horizontal rectangles […]
