Reviews

Robert Motherwell @ Bernard Jacobson
AbCrit

John Bunker reviews Robert Motherwell: Abstract Expressionism at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, on view through November 26, 2016. Bunker writes: “Motherwell has a reputation for being the clever aesthete who was always too enamoured of the ‘Old World’ of Mediterranean sunshine, azure skies, Gauloises packets – and always with an eye for rare book wrappers […]

Ed Moses: Painting as Process
Studio International

Jill Spalding reviews Ed Moses: Painting as Process at Albertz Benda, New York, on view through October 15, 2016. Spalding writes: “With a restless promise that won him a solo show in 1957 at the then nascent Ferus Gallery, [Moses] never ceased to experiment. He worked with latex, to great sales and acclaim, but reverted […]

Rubens Ghenov @ Morgan Lehman
Art in America

Julian Kreimer reviews the recent exhibition Rubens Ghenov: Accoutrements in Marwa, an Interlude in Sliver at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York. Kreimer writes: “Ghenov has absorbed the poet’s mantra that the fewer elements in a work, the more each of them matters… [his] ability to balance a powerful sense of nostalgia with an intensely slippery […]

Gary Petersen @ McKenzie Fine Art
Hyperallergic

John Yau reviews Gary Petersen: Back There Behind the Sun at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on view through October 16, 2016. Yau writes: “Gary Petersen’s skewed geometric paintings call forth analogies to music and architecture, a realm of vertical intervals and diagonal supports spliced into a precarious balance… His off-center, stacked shapes have a […]

Kyle Staver @ Kent Fine Art
Hyperallergic

John Yau reviews paintings by Kyle Staver at Kent Fine Art, New York, on view through October 22, 2016. Yau concludes: “By introducing a touch of comedy, Staver opens up well-known myths and stories, making them more human than lofty. Wit, tenderness and empathy inform her views of the tragic, suggesting that we are not […]

Zao Wou-Ki @ Asia Society
New York Times

Roberta Smith reviews No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki at Asia Society, New York, on view through January 8, 2017. Smith writes: “It is an intriguing, peripatetic, at times beautiful affair of 60 works from 1943 to 2003, with paintings on canvas and paper, watercolors and several kinds of prints. Yet Zao slips through your fingers, running […]

Clintel Steed @ Steven Harvey
Hyperallergic

John Yau reviews Endymion: Recent Paintings by Clintel Steed at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, on view through October 9, 2016. Yau writes: “Steed strokes the paste-like paint onto the surface, creating an uneven tactile skin that is pebbled and brushy. This tactility is at odds with our digital world – its endless barrage […]

Stephanie McMahon: Buoyed by Color
New American Paintings Blog

Shana Dumont Garr reviews the recent exhibition Stephanie McMahon: Close to Me at T+H Gallery, Boston. Garr writes: “In Blue Nude (2016) … sharp angles still betray the human touch and coexist with more organic brushwork. These are among the paintings that offer a contemporary take on a collage sensibility, one informed by the digital […]

Red: Ming Dynasty/Mark Rothko
Neoteric Art

Norbert Marszalek blogs about a visit to Red: Ming Dynasty/Mark Rothko at the The Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., on view through February 20, 2017. Marszalek writes: “The painting is Rothko’s Untitled (Seagram Mural sketch) from 1959 that was part of his Four Seasons commission. The […]

The Gifts of Stuart Davis
The New Criterion

James Panero reviews Stuart Davis: In Full Swing at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on view through September 25, 2016. Panero writes: “The particular genius of Davis’s subsequent modernist direction was how he went on to integrate European stylistic innovation with his unique Ashcan vision. Through the flattening, flickering, fleeting perspectives of […]

Elisabeth Condon @ Lesley Heller Workspace
Hyperallergic

Edward M. Gómez reviews Elisabeth Condon: Bird and Flower at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on view through October 16, 2016. Gómez writes: “To produce her latest canvases, Condon has experimented with some new approaches that, in effect, have made the production of her variety of abstraction as much the subject of these new works […]

Dan Ramirez @ the National Museum of Mexican Art
New City Art

Mark Pohlad reviews Contemplations: Dan Ramirez Works from the Permanent Collection at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, on view through October 9, 2016. Pohlad writes: “Ramirez’s works reward careful viewing. Lines gradually attenuate and vanish, the edges of pieces are painted, and shadows are cast by slightly askew interstices. But all this formal […]

Etel Adnan’s Vibrant, Visual Poems
Hyperallergic

Maria Howard reviews Etal Adnan: The Weight of the World at the Serpentine Gallery, London, on view through September 11, 2016. Howard writes: “[Adnan’s] paintings evoke sheer joy, their style unpretentious, not naive but innocent, at odds with her poetry and writings that bear witness to the violence of the world. They may seem like […]

Turner and Colour
Burlington Magazine

Martin Butlin reviews Turner et la Couleur at the Hôtel de Caumont, Aix-en-Provence, on view through September 18, 2016. Butlin notes that the show is “one of the most fascinating of recent exhibitions of the works of J.M.W. Turner, one that reveals a whole new aspect of his vision… covering all Turner’s career but with […]

Sarah McEneaney @ Locks Gallery
The Artblog

Michael Lieberman reviews Sarah McEneaney: When You Wish at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, on view through October 8, 2016. Lieberman writes that McEneaney’s work presents “an extremely appealing and artistically unique glimpse into a consciousness of the moment that potentially could be shared by any seeing person in his or her own particular time and place.”

Watteau’s Art of War
New York Sun Arts

Xico Greenwald reviews Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France at The Frick Collection, New York, on view through October 2, 2016. Greenwald writes: “The paintings gathered here might have been integral to Watteau’s artistic development. Perhaps these early experiments composing figures outdoors sparked the idea for fête galante scenes, with wounded soldiers […]

Paula Modersohn-Becker
Studio International

Anna McNay reviews the recent exhibition of works by Paula Modersohn-Becker at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. McNay writes: “[Modersohn-Becker’s] short but highly fertile career – she produced more than 700 paintings in seven years (1900-07), working seven days a week, ‘with a passion that excludes everything else’ – took place at […]

John Santoro @ Richard Gray Gallery
New City Art

Chris Miller reviews John Santoro, Slow Painting at Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, on view through September 7, 2016. Miller writes that Santoro’s paintings “reflect cosmic rather than psychological forces, even if they have been scaled down to personal size. Each painting is a tempest in a teapot, with the same swirling intensity often found in […]

Seen in New York, September 2015

Paul Corio reviews a selection of exhibitions, including shows of work by Dana Schultz, Gabriele Evertz, Jaqueline Cedar, Nate Ethier, Stephen Maine, Terry Haggerty, and others.

Avital Burg at Slag
Arts in Bushwick

Etty Yaniv reviews Avital Burg: Fancy Seeing You at Slag Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through August 9, 2015. Yaniv observes: "Each of Burg’s portraits evokes a distinct sense of staged theatrical drama, in which both the artist and her animate or inanimate models co-inhabit. She affirms that her models have to be people who […]