Reviews
Steve DiBenedetto: A Denatured Humanism
New York Review of Books
Dan Nadel reviews Steve DiBenedetto: Toasted with Everything at Derek Eller Gallery, New York, on view through April 22, 2018. Nadel notes that DiBenedetto’s paintings “are first and foremost creations of the physical act of brush and scraper on canvas—where once DiBenedetto layered his paintings with allusions to psychedelic phenomena, science fiction films and literature, and modernist […]
From Stasis to Kinesis: The Woosters of Ted Stamm
artcritical
Robert C. Morgan writes about Ted Stamm’s Wooster paintings, recently on view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Morgan writes: “The Woosters employ an unusual rectangular theme that extends into a triangular hinge on the left side. These works were both drawn in graphite and painted in black and white (and, later in silver). At the outset (1978), […]
When Photorealism Meets Delacroix
Hyperallergic
Joe Fyfe observes connections between the work of Robert Bechtle and Eugene Delacroix. Bechtle’s work is on view at Gladstone 64, New York through April 21, 2018. Fyfe writes: “Both Delacroix and Bechtle are representing an ethos, that is, something that an era believes, but not something that is necessarily true. In both cases, this belief […]
Peter Lanyon: Total Immersion in Landscape
Apollo Magazine
Maggie Gray reviews Peter Lanyon: Cornwall Inside Out recently on view at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London. Gray writes: “Over the course of his career Lanyon devised a unique approach to painting that relied on his total immersion within the landscape. He would walk, drive, climb, cycle, swim and eventually glide across and over Cornwall; he learnt […]
Murillo: The Self-Portraits
Studio International
Emily Spicer reviews Murillo: The Self-Portraits at the National Gallery, London, on view through May 21, 2018. Spicer begins: “At least 20 years passed between the Spanish artists Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-82) painting his first self-portrait and his second and, on the surface, they look strikingly similar. The artist is wearing black, has framed his […]
The Dazzling Sweep of the Hunter Color School
Hyperallergic
Thomas Micchelli reviews Radiant Energy at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, on view through May 13, 2018. Micchelli begins: “Radiant Energy is both the title and the most succinct descriptor of the exhibition bringing together, for the first time, the paintings of Gabriele Evertz, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld, key members of the […]
Jennifer Coates: Lullabies for Difficult Times
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Jennifer Coates,: Correspondences at Freight + Volume, New York, on view through April 15, 2018. Butler writes: “At first glance, the paintings convey a sense of joy, in the same way that Paul Klee’s idiosyncratic visual language does. Yet in some, like Bull Spirit(2018) and Small Rabbit Spirit(2018), globs of slathered paint, […]
Trevor Winkfield’s Undomesticated Imagination
Hyperallergic
John Yau reviews Trevor Winkfield: Saints, Dancers and Acrobats at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, on view through March 25, 2018. Yau writes: “Modest in scale, rigorous in execution, mysterious and aloof in outcome, Winkfield’s invented forms tell us that all is not lost, that capitalism does not yet own our imagination — that […]
Josef Albers: Bauhaus in Mexico
New York Review of Books
J. Hoberman reviews Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, on view through March 28, 2018. Hoberman writes that the exhibition “makes Albers’s appreciation [of Mexico] evident, juxtaposing his studies, typically drawn on graph paper, with both his finished artwork (mostly paintings, one lithograph) and his fastidious arrangements of tiny on-site photographs. Serially organized […]
Designing Women: Kurt Kauper at Almine Rech
Margaret McCann reviews an exhibition of works by Kurt Kauper at Almine Rech.
Joanne Greenbaum: Structure and Flow
Big Red & Shiny
Liza Bingham reviews Joanne Greenbaum: Things We Said Today at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, on view through April 7, 2018. Bingham writes: “The abstract paintings in the Anderson Auditorium, all untitled, are ultimately nothing if not self-portraits, of a kind. They reveal Greenbaum’s compulsive drawing practice, writ large on […]
Thomas Nozkowski @ Pace Gallery
Brooklyn Rail
William Corbett reviews an exhibition of paintings by Thomas Nozkowski at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through February 15, 2018. Corbett writes that Nozkowski’s paintings “have a cheerful and clear engagement with their world. They do not ask to be read or figured out. They belong to that strain of twentieth century American painting […]
Fragonard’s Merry Company
New York Review of Books
Colin B. Bailey writes about Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures recently on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bailey writes that the show “[celebrates] the thirty-seven-year-old Fragonard as a practitioner of ‘pure painting’—an action painter avant la lettre. His rainbow palette is ‘parrot colored’—to use a term that was applied to Renoir in the heyday of […]
John Walker: At the Edge of Land and Water
artcritical
Wendy Gittler reviews John Walker: The Sea and The Brush recently on view at the New York Studio School. Gittler writes: “Walker’s quest to reassemble pictorial language from a diverse painting vocabulary is no easy task. Throughout his long career he has searched for ways to meld the painterly traditions of Goya, Constable, Turner and […]
Byron Kim’s Painting Ritual
Two Coats of Paint
Sharon Butler reviews Byron Kim: Sunday Paintings at James Cohan Gallery, New York, on view through February 17, 2018. Butler writes: “What makes [Kim’s paintings] unremarkable are their size and the undramatic skies they depict – not the complex, sublime sky paintings made by, say, great Dutch painters like Aelbert Cuyp and Jacob van Ruisdael. Instead, they are […]
Laura Owens: Art in Free Fall
New York Review of Books
David Salle writes about the work of Laura Owens on the occasion of a recent mid-career retrospective of Laura Owens’ work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Salle writes: “Owens’s paintings are squarely in the middle of a postmodern aesthetic that’s been gaining momentum for the last ten or fifteen years. It […]
Cézanne Portraits: Relentless Intimacy
London Review of Books
T.J. Clark reviews Cézanne Portraits on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London (through February 11) and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. from March 25 – July 1, 2018. Clark writes: “Certainly the idea that Cézanne’s approach to picture-making is essentially technical and ‘objective’, locked in a painter’s preserve … is useless. It offers […]
Sensate Wisdom: Vincent Desiderio at Marlborough
Through the decades Desiderio’s “sensate wisdom,” the unique visualizing capabilities Alberti ascribed to painting, have persevered, balanced with a savvy contemporary approach to subject.
Pat Adams @ Victoria Munroe Fine Art
artcritical
Anne Sherwood Pundyk reviews Pat Adams: Then Found at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, New York, on view through January 27, 2018. Pundyk writes: “The works in Then Found span the years 1997 to 2016. This is only a third of the more than six decades Adams has spent building her extensive body of perceptual, non-figurative, mixed media work. […]
Christian Bonnefoi: Taking the Painter Out of Painting
Hyperallergic
Gwenaël Kerlidou writes about the work of Christian Bonnefoi. Kerlidou writes: “Bonnefoi’s strategies seem to condense a few aspects of the work of his American contemporaries: the objectification and theatricalization of a gesture devoid of pathos of David Reed; the deconstructing strategies of Jonathan Lasker — even if Lasker’s use of exaggeratedly thick brushstrokes seems […]