Exhibitions
Margaret Clarke @ the National Gallery of Ireland
Apollo Magazine
Tom Walker reviews Margaret Clarke: An Independent Spirit at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, on view through until August 20, 2017. Walker writes: “Throughout her career, Clarke enjoyed commercial success as a portrait painter, receiving several official commissions. But the best of her work in this genre, often done when not working to order, […]
Richard Gerstl @ the Neue Galerie
Hyperallergic
Angelica Frey reviews works by Richard Gerstl at the Neue Galerie, New York, on view through September 25, 2017. Frey writes: “Gerstl was a polarizing figure, a ‘neurotic Narcissus’, as co-founder of the Leopold Museum, Diethard Leopold defined him … Gerstl perfectly embodied the artistic and existential turmoil of Vienna in the last years of […]
Howard Hodgkin: Painting India
The Telegraph Arts
Mark Hudson reviews Howard Hodgkin: Painting India at Hepworth Wakefield, on view through October 8, 2017. Hudson writes: “The paintings he produced in India and in recollection at home are far from straightforward travelogue. For Hodgkin, the subcontinent represented a place apart from the inhibited West, where life was ‘transparent’: with emotion so close to […]
Fernand Léger @ Centre Pompidou-Metz
Hyperallergic
Joseph Nechvatal reviews Fernand Léger: Beauty Is Everywhere at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France, on view through October 30, 2017. Nechvatal notes that he “[prefers] Léger’s work when it points at neurocomputing wetware, biorobotics, and AI-charged automation; when it hums away in the space between the mechanic and the organic. This is when Léger functions as a […]
Lauren Luloff: Interview
Hamptons Art Hub
Pat Rogers interviews Lauren Luloff on the occasion of Luloff’s exhibition Sun Drawn at Halsey Mckay Gallery, East Hampton, NY, on view through July 24, 2017. Rogers’ introduction notes: “Created from bedsheets that are ripped into sections, painted and suspended, [Luloff’s] new works are inspired by landscapes, nature and natural forms found in the Brooklyn […]
Raphael: The Drawings
London Review of Books
Charles Hope reviews Raphael: The Drawings at The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, on view through September 3, 2017. Hope writes: “One of the great strengths of the exhibition is the way it illustrates Raphael’s increasing mastery of and obvious pleasure in the medium of drawing during his years in Rome. This comes across most strongly in […]
Helen Frankenthaler @ the Clark Institute
Hyperallergic
Thomas Micchelli reviews As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings (through October 9), and No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts (through September 24). Both exhibitions are on view at at the Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Micchelli writes that both exhibitions “offer a compact, revelatory, and frequently stunning look at an artist whose reputation has been all too often yoked […]
Camille Pissarro: The Perennial Student
New York Review of Books
Julian Bell reviews two exhibitions: Camille Pissarro: Le premier des impressionnistes at the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris (through July 16) and Pissarro à Éragny: La nature retrouvée at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris (through July 9). Bell writes: “Nearly always, Pissarro composes poems about passing light that can be mapped intelligibly, letting you know just […]
Frank Bowling: Interview
Apollo Magazine
Imelda Barnard interviews Frank Bowling on the occasion of Bowling’s exhibition Mappa Mundi at Haus der Kunst, Munich, on view through January 7, 2018. Barnard writes: “‘The possibilities of paint are never-ending,’ Frank Bowling tells me… Bowling’s persistent urge to reinvent painting has led him to experiment with elaborate procedures – stitching, staining, pouring, dripping, spilling. […]
Unlimited: Painting and Political Upheaval
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Unlimited: Painting in France in the 1960s & 1970s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Butler writes: “The incisive, elegantly installed exhibition in Philadelphia, comprising work made from 1964 through 1974, highlights some of the ideas that were percolating before and after the 1968 riots. Artists began to consider how they were using […]
Ellen Berkenblit @ Anton Kern
New York Review of Books
Dan Nadel reviews paintings by Ellen Berkenblit recently on view at Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Nadel writes: “In defiance and celebration of the earthen black that surrounds them, the vigorously delineated horses, flowers, hands, faces, stripes, a nude, and a foot found in Ellen Berkenblit’s striking new paintings at Anton Kern Gallery are a […]
Gillian Ayres @ National Museum of Wales
London Review of Books
Julian Bell reviews an exhibition of works by Gillian Ayres on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff through September 3, 2017. Bell writes: “The huge canvases Gillian Ayres painted during the 1980s rush at you like Atlantic breakers. Bursts of orange, viridian, scarlet, yellow and cyan tumble forward and engulf you; convulsions of oil […]
Aspects of Abstraction @ Lisson Gallery
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Aspects of Abstraction at Lisson Gallery, New York, on view through August 11, 2017. The show features works by Leon Polk Smith, Paul Feeley, Joanna Pousette-Dart, and Marina Adams. Yau writes: “The exhibition’s circumspect title makes no grand or inclusive claim. It brings together four diverse artists from different generations who share similar tendencies… Frankly, I […]
Fahrelnissa Zeid @ Tate Modern
Studio International
Emily Spicer reviews an exhibition of works by Fahrelnissa Zeid at Tate Modern, London, on view through October 8, 2017. Spicer writes that in Zeid’s painting Resolved Problems (1948), “[figuration] drops away entirely. This is a joyously coloured canvas of gestural shapes that seem to jostle in front of your eyes. Red is the dominant colour, a hot, […]
Richard Smith: Work of Five Decades
AbCrit
John Bunker reviews Richard Smith: Work of Five Decades at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London, on view through July 15, 2017. Bunker writes: “To point to and paraphrase Matisse … he said the first line that an artist makes as she/he begins a drawing is in fact the 5th as there are already the four […]
Milton Avery’s Unique American Modernism
Apollo Magazine
Matthew Sperling reviews Milton Avery at Victoria Miro, London, on view through July 29, 2017. Sperling writes: “In Excursion on the Thames (1953), one of several pictures in the exhibition deriving from Avery’s only trip to Europe in 1952, the perfect balance is struck between loving observation of the everyday and visionary form-making: the pleasure […]
Wayne Thiebaud @ White Cube Mason’s Yard
Studio International
Matthew Rudman reviews Wayne Thiebaud: 1962 to 2017 at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, on view through July 2, 2017. Rudman writes: “What this exhibition makes clear is not simply Thiebaud’s longevity, with works on show dating from 1962 to 2017, but the sustained quality, experimentation and sense of play in his output … Portraits […]
Peter Shear @ the Fortnight Institute
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Peter Shear: Magnolias All at Once at the Fortnight Institute, New York, on view through July 16, 2017. Yau writes: “Shear is interested in composition, color relationships, how forms sit within the rectangle of the canvas, what can be done with the edges, and the texture of paint… There is something wonderfully […]
Ellsworth Kelly: Last Paintings & Plant Drawings
Art Observed
D. Creahan reviews Ellsworth Kelly: Last Paintings and Plant Drawings at Matthew Marks Gallery, o view through June 24, 2017. Crehan writes: “Alongside his body of paintings, Matthew Marks is also exhibiting a series of Kelly’s Plant Drawings, a long-running series of graphite and ink drawings made as observations of the natural curves and lines of […]
Mark Tobey: Threading Light
The New Criterion
Mario Naves reviews Mark Tobey: Threading Light at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, on view through September 10, 2017. Naves writes: “‘Threading Light’ is a superb exhibition. Sensitively paced and keenly selected, the exhibition underscores painterly and metaphorical continuities, all the while tracing a development that, though not without hiccups, is streamlined and, until the […]